tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-136226222016-12-07T14:48:15.119-05:00threewayfightAN INSURGENT BLOG ON THE STRUGGLE AGAINST THE STATE AND FASCISMthreewayfighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03328513990043748837noreply@blogger.comBlogger370125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-83290611686380566102016-12-03T18:45:00.001-05:002016-12-03T21:41:48.965-05:00Alt-right: more misogynistic than many neonazis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-40jrsqe-pSc/WD96Yj_ntoI/AAAAAAAAAKI/S8BgT1UZGXAKigy1_jcDjTiLc7hF3GJSACLcB/s1600/%253C%253Apatriarchy%253E.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-40jrsqe-pSc/WD96Yj_ntoI/AAAAAAAAAKI/S8BgT1UZGXAKigy1_jcDjTiLc7hF3GJSACLcB/s320/%253C%253Apatriarchy%253E.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>One of the major problems with the <a href="https://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/11/calling-them-alt-right-helps-us-fight.html" target="_blank">campaign to replace the term “alt-right” with “white supremacist”</a>&nbsp;is that it tends to obscure other important dimensions of alt-right politics. The alt-right’s misogyny merits special attention, for a couple of reasons. First, woman-hating shapes and drives alt-right online activism in a specific and important way. Second, the alt-right is actually more misogynistic than many neonazi groups have been in recent decades — further belying claims that “alt-right” is just a benign code word for “neonazi.”<br /><br />The alt-right’s use of online harassment as a political tactic is one of its most distinctive and important features. In the Spring of 2016, for example, anti-Trump protesters at Portland State University were <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/how-students-for-trump-terrorized-portland-state-university-88396c06c743#.22wi4ikj5" target="_blank">flooded</a> with racist, transphobic, and antisemitic messages, rape and death threats, and doxxing (public releases of personal information, such as where they live and work), sent from anonymous social media accounts. And it’s not just progressive activists who get this kind of treatment. David French, staff writer at the conservative <i>National Review</i>, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441319/donald-trump-alt-right-internet-abuse-never-trump-movement" target="_blank">describes</a> the year-long stream of relentless online abuse his family has endured because he criticized Trump and the alt-right: <br /><blockquote>“I saw images of my daughter’s face in gas chambers, with a smiling Trump in a Nazi uniform preparing to press a button and kill her. I saw her face photoshopped into images of slaves. She was called a ‘niglet’ and a ‘dindu.’ The alt-right unleashed on my wife, Nancy, claiming that she had slept with black men while I was deployed to Iraq, and that I loved to watch while she had sex with ‘black bucks.’ People sent her pornographic images of black men having sex with white women, with someone photoshopped to look like me, watching.”</blockquote>It’s no coincidence that sexual violence and the objectification and humiliation of women and girls feature heavily in these campaigns. As a tactic, alt-right online harassment is rooted squarely in the <a href="https://psmag.com/why-women-aren-t-welcome-on-the-internet-aa21fdbc8d6#.dcuiqvot9" target="_blank">pervasive, systematic pattern of threats and abuse</a> that women have faced online for years. This pattern of harassment, which Anne Thériault has described as “<a href="http://www.vice.com/read/lets-call-female-online-harassment-what-it-really-is-gender-terrorism-481" target="_blank">gender terrorism</a>,” often involves threats of rape and other forms of violence, and it’s used to silence women all the time. Whether or not the perpetrators also use physical intimidation or attacks, as they sometimes do, the effects can be devastating.<br /><br />A key connecting link here is <a href="http://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-why-an-explainer-for-non-geeks-1642909080" target="_blank">Gamergate</a>, an online campaign starting in 2014 to silence and terrorize women who worked in — or were critical of sexism in — the video game industry. This campaign took the diffuse online harassment of women and sharpened it into coordinated attacks against a series of specific women, who faced streams of misogynistic invective, rape and death threats, and doxxing. Gamergate caused several women to <a href="http://kotaku.com/another-woman-in-gaming-flees-home-following-death-thre-1645280338" target="_blank">leave their homes</a> out of fear for their physical safety.<br /><br />The driving force behind Gamergate was the “<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/01/manosphere-mens-rights-movement-terms" target="_blank">manosphere</a>,” an online antifeminist male subculture that has grown rapidly in recent years, largely outside traditional right-wing networks. There’s significant <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/15/alt-right-manosphere-mainstream-politics-breitbart" target="_blank">overlap</a> between the manosphere and the alt-right, both of which are heavily active on discussion websites such as 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit. A number of men who promoted Gamergate — such as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160826144457/https://voxday.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Theodore Beale</a> (Vox Day), <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hOyXVoHCErAJ:mattforney.com/publishers-statement-gamergate/+&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us&amp;client=safari" target="_blank">Matt Forney</a>, and <a href="https://olaasm.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/at-the-intersection-of-gamergate-weevgate-abusers-their-knowing-apologists/" target="_blank">Andrew Auernheimer</a> (weev) — are also active in the alt-right, while other alt-rightists — such as Gregory Hood at <i>Counter-Currents</i> — <a href="https://angrywhitemen.org/2014/12/01/neo-nazis-for-gamergate/" target="_blank">defended</a> Gamergate as an important front in the war to defend white European culture.<br /><br />Not surprisingly, the alt-right brought Gamergate tactics into electoral politics. A lot of alt-right harassment targets women — even, as Robert Evans <a href="http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2381-toddler-rape-threats-other-tactics-alt-right.html" target="_blank">points out</a>, “when they’re ostensibly targeting men”: for example, when alt-rightists’ harassment of Republican political strategist Rick Wilson failed to have an impact, they started harassing his 22-year-old daughter. “[T]hey stalked her at her school, they followed her, they put notes on the door where she used to live…. they’ve got people calling the University of Tennessee saying ‘Eleanor Wilson's involved in prostitution and drug sales and all this other shit.’” The attacks on David French’s family detailed above follow a similar pattern.<br /><br />Harassing and defaming women isn’t just a tactic; it also serves the alt-right’s broader agenda and long-term vision for society. Thanks partly (but <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100412000424/http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2010/04/07/why-voting-should-be-male-only" target="_blank">by no means only</a>) to manosphere influence, most of the alt-right declares loudly that women are intellectually and morally inferior to men and should be stripped of any political role. Alt-rightists tell us that it’s natural for men to rule over women and that women want and need this, that “<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160301023027/http://therightstuff.biz/2013/12/02/women-should-hate-freedom" target="_blank">giving women freedom [was] one of mankind’s greatest mistakes</a>,” that women should “<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-alt-right-white-male-supremacy-20161125-story.html" target="_blank">never be allowed to make foreign policy [because] their vindictiveness knows no bounds</a>,” that feminism is defined by mental illness and has turned women into “<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160326082356/http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2015/6/2/cat-lady-culture" target="_blank">caricatures of irrationality and hysteria</a>.” And while alt-rightists give lip service to the traditionalist idea that women have important, dignified roles to play as mothers and homemakers, the overwhelming message is that women as a group are contemptible, pathetic creatures not worthy of respect.<br /><br />This might seem like standard far right poison, but it’s actually worse than what many neonazi groups &nbsp;outside the alt-right have been saying about women — or at least non-Jewish white women — for the past few decades. Like alt-rightists today, neonazis have long <a href="http://www.americannaziparty.com/platform/index.php" target="_blank">argued</a> that gender differences are natural and immutable, and that men and women have distinct but complementary social roles to play. For <a href="http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/2016/02/the-female-vote-a-terrible-idea-since-1920" target="_blank">some neonazis</a>, this means that any public political role for women is dangerous and wrong. Yet since the 1980s other neonazis have promoted a kind of racist quasi-feminism, arguing that white women have important roles to play not only as mothers and nurturers, but also as race warriors in their own right, and that white men's derogation of white women should be combated.<br /><br />Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (WAR), one of the most influential neonazi groups of the 1980s, pioneered this line, sponsoring an affiliate called the Aryan Women’s League and <a href="http://resist.com/positions/Women.html" target="_blank">denouncing</a> (white) women’s oppression as a product of Jewish influence. Over the following quarter century, a number of neonazi groups, including National Vanguard, SS Action Group, and the National Socialist Movement, also criticized white women's oppression to varying degrees, as historian Martin Durham details in his 2007 book&nbsp;<i><a href="https://www.routledge.com/White-Rage-The-Extreme-Right-and-American-Politics/Durham/p/book/9780415362337" target="_blank">White Rage: The Extreme Right and American Politics</a></i>&nbsp;(Chapter 6). Today, similar positions are promoted by groups such as the Creativity Movement-affiliated <a href="http://creativitymovement.net/wfrontier/Women%20of%20History.html" target="_blank">Women’s Frontier</a>, which rejects the idea of male-female equality yet encourages women to become activists and leaders as well as wives and mothers, and the international group <a href="http://www.wau14.com/mission-statement/" target="_blank">Women for Aryan Unity</a>, which calls for “reinventing the concept of ‘feminism’ within the parameters of Race and Revolution.”<br /><br />Combining white supremacy with elements of feminism traces back to at least the 1920s, when the half-million-strong <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520257870" target="_blank">Women of the Ku Klux Klan</a> criticized gender inequality among white Protestants and recruited many former women’s suffrage activists. It’s one of many ways that far rightists appropriate progressive political themes in distorted form, from anti-capitalism to ecological awareness. <br /><br />A similar kind of quasi-feminism also had a foothold in the alt-right during its early years. As I <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/09/alternativerightcom-paleoconservatism.html" target="_blank">wrote</a> in 2010, the original <i>AlternativeRight.com</i> featured some articles that reflected “an old school conservative anti-feminism,” but also others that “reflect[ed] feminist influence”: <br /><blockquote>“Andrew Yeoman, for example, lists ‘kryptonite to women’ among the alternative right movement's eight major weaknesses. ‘Many women won't associate with our ideas. Why is this important? Because it leaves half our people out of the struggle. The women that do stick around have to deal with a constant litany of abuse and frequent courtship invitations from unwanted suitors. ...nothing says “you’re not important to us” [more] than sexualizing women in the movement. Don’t tell me that’s not an issue. I’ve seen it happen in all kinds of radical circles, and ours is the worst for it.’” [<i>Yeoman was then the leading U.S. spokesperson for National-Anarchism, an offshoot of neonazism that advocates a decentralized system of ethnically pure “tribal” enclaves.</i>]</blockquote>As far as I can tell, such quasi-feminism is now completely gone from the alt-right, replaced by a near consensus that women should be vilified and excluded. In contrast to Yeoman’s frank acknowledgement that sexism kept women out of the movement, the Traditionalist Youth Network now&nbsp;<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160316034040/http://www.tradyouth.org/2015/04/where-the-white-women-at/" target="_blank">argues</a>&nbsp;that women have been underrepresented in white nationalist circles because by nature they are “neither designed nor inclined to develop or encourage politically aggressive subcultures.” <i>The Daily Stormer</i>&nbsp;has a policy against publishing anything written by women and <a href="http://blog.adl.org/extremism/white-supremacists-feud-over-the-racist-gender-gap" target="_blank">calls for limiting women's involvement in the movement</a>&nbsp;—in the face of criticism from women on the more old school neonazi discussion site <i>Stormfront</i>. And Gamergater-turned-alt-rightist Matt Forney <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-alt-right-white-male-supremacy-20161125-story.html" target="_blank">declares</a> that “Trying to ‘appeal’ to women is an exercise in pointlessness…. it’s not that women should be unwelcome [in the alt-right], it’s that they’re unimportant.”<br /><br />Let’s hope that men like Forney continue to believe that women are unimportant — it might just be their undoing. Let’s hope they continue to underestimate women like <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/how-students-for-trump-terrorized-portland-state-university-88396c06c743#.vt3lbe3mc" target="_blank">Alyssa Pagan</a>, one of the anti-Trump protesters at Portland State University who faced alt-right harassment and threats this past Spring: <br /><blockquote>“‘Much of the online alt-right’s assessment about my lot in capitalist hierarchy is correct,’ Pagan told ThinkProgress. ‘A person like me should be too timid and mired in shame to dare challenge such open chauvinism. Black, Latina, Trans, poor, survivor, etc. But their read of my feminist praxis as fragile is way off,’ she continued. ‘I don’t get triggered, I don’t yearn for safe space, and I don’t have anything to lose.’”</blockquote><br /><b>Photo credit:</b>&nbsp;Charlotte Cooper, via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cecooper/6201277661/in/photostream/" target="_blank">Flickr Commons</a> (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode" target="_blank">CC BY 2.0</a>)<br /><br /><b>Related posts on <i>Three Way Fight</i>:</b><br /><a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/11/calling-them-alt-right-helps-us-fight.html" target="_blank">Calling them 'alt-right' helps us fight them</a>, November 2016<br /><a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/11/jack-donovan-on-men-masculine-tribalism.html" target="_blank">Jack Donovan on men: a masculine tribalism for the far right</a>, November 2015<br /><a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2005/09/notes-on-women-and-right-w_112787003380492443.html" target="_blank">Notes on Women and Right-Wing Movements</a>, September 2005<br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-26662241064483939552016-11-22T17:02:00.000-05:002016-12-03T20:13:04.518-05:00Calling them "alt-right" helps us fight them<big><big><i>If “alt-right” is a benign-sounding label to hide white supremacist ideology, why do so many alt-rightists go out of their way to sound as shockingly bigoted as possible?</i></big></big><br /><br />&nbsp;There’s a campaign among Trump opponents to get people to stop using the term “alt-right” — a campaign that I believe is misguided. Supposedly, “alt-right” is a deceptive euphemism that white supremacists created to hide their hateful beliefs. <i>Belt Magazine</i> <a href="http://beltmag.com/dont-use-term-alt-right-refer-white-supremacists/#comment-323866" target="_blank">floated this idea</a> back in July:<br /><blockquote>“‘Alt-right’ — shorthand for the the Alternative Right — is, like ‘pro-life,’&nbsp;the term the group gave itself. It is misleading, misrepresentative, and, most importantly, a benign or even attractive term…. So let us pick a new term to refer to this new group… ‘White supremacist’ works for me. ‘White nationalist’ seems apt as well. In some cases, ‘neo-Nazi’ applies.”</blockquote>Recently, <i>Daily Kos</i>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/11/14/1599477/-They-re-Not-Alt-Right-They-re-NeoNazis-White-Supremacists" target="_blank">echoed the thought</a>:<br /><blockquote>“The Neo Nazis know that their usual tags inspire revulsion amongst many Americans. That’s why Bannon and his ilk have invented the term ‘Alt Right’….<br /><br />They knew they had to rebrand. And they knew using a different term would help obfuscate the truth of what they are.<br /><br />So stop using the term ‘Alt-Right’ and just come out and call them what they are:<br /><br />Neo Nazis. And if that’s too raw, then at least have the integrity to call them White Supremacists or White Nationalists.”</blockquote>Similar arguments have been circulating on Twitter, as <i>Quartz</i> <a href="http://qz.com/840267/what-is-the-alt-right/" target="_blank">reports</a>.<br /><br />I completely agree that we should expose and combat white supremacist politics in all its forms, but a campaign to abolish the term “alt-right” doesn’t help us do this and actually makes it harder. If we want to understand the alt-right’s strengths and weaknesses, we need to understand what it shares with older white nationalist currents — but also what sets it apart. By contrast, the “don’t use ‘alt-right’” campaign promotes misunderstanding and ignorance about the movement it’s trying to confront.<br /><br />To begin with, if “alt-right” is just a benign-sounding label to hide white supremacist ideology, why do so many alt-rightists go out of their way to sound as shockingly bigoted as possible? Here’s how <i>Antifascist News</i> <a href="https://antifascistnews.net/2015/08/16/cuckservative-how-the-alt-right-took-off-their-masks-and-revealed-their-white-hoods/" target="_blank">describes</a> one of the most popular alt-right websites, <i>The Right Stuff</i>: <br /><blockquote>“[On <i>The Right Stuff</i>] they choose to openly use racial slurs, degrade women and rape survivors, mock the holocaust and call for violence against Jews. Their podcast, The Daily Shoah, which is a play on The Daily Show and the Yiddish term for The Holocaust, is a roundtable discussion of different racists broadcasting under pseudonyms.&nbsp;Here they do voice ‘impressions’ of Jews, and consistently use terms like ‘Nig Nog,’ “Muds (referring to ‘mud races,’ meaning non-white), and calling people of African descent ‘Dingos.’&nbsp; The N-word, homophobic slurs, and calls for enforced cultural patriarchy and heteronormativity are commonplace.”</blockquote>As <i>Antifascist News</i> points out, the racist language that’s routine on <i>The Right Stuff</i> is so vile it’s not even allowed on <i>Stormfront</i>, the oldest and largest neonazi website.<br /><br />Far from toning down their politics to sound more benign, many alt-rightists have actually taken the opposite approach. Old school white supremacists such as David Duke and Willis Carto made careers of dressing up their nazi politics as “populism” or “conservatism.” But now alt-right “shitlords” bombard Twitter with swastikas and gas chamber jokes, and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160130182619/http://therightstuff.biz/2015/10/24/fashism" target="_blank">ridicule antifascism</a> the way 1960s radicals ridiculed anticommunism.<br /><br />The <i>Daily Kos</i> idea that Steve Bannon “and his ilk” invented the term “alt-right” compounds the distortion. Bannon is actually a latecomer to the movement, a popularizer who — first at <i>Breitbart News</i> and then as a member of Trump’s team — has offered a toned-down version of alt-right politics for mass consumption. Richard Spencer — who introduced the term “<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/09/alternativerightcom-paleoconservatism.html" target="_blank">alternative right</a>” years ago to describe a convergence of diverse right-wing forces outside the conservative establishment — has termed this fellow-traveler phenomenon “<a href="https://antifascistnews.net/2016/09/06/alt-light-or-alt-right-understanding-what-the-alt-right-really-is/" target="_blank">alt-lite</a>.”<br /><br />On a deeper level, the “don’t call them ‘alt-right’” campaign embodies the unfortunate idea that white supremacist politics are basically all the same. Supposedly, once we know that alt-rightists uphold racist ideology, the details don’t really matter, and exploring them just distracts us from the central issue. But it’s precisely these “details” that help us understand what has made the alt-right a significant force, its capacity to tap into popular fears and grievances, its relationship with other political forces, its internal tensions and points of weakness. A few decades ago, most of the racist far right abandoned Jim Crow segregationism in favor of white nationalism — the doctrine that people of European descent shouldn’t just rule over people of color, but exclude or exterminate them entirely. Opponents who failed to recognize this shift were caught off guard when white supremacists moved from terrorizing black people to waging war on the U.S. government.<br /><br />Saying we shouldn’t call them “alt-right” is saying that we don’t need to understand our enemy. It’s like a conservative in 1969 looking at the New Left — spanning from Alinskyites to Yippies, from Clean for Gene canvassers to the Weathermen — saying, “This ‘New Left’ label is just a ploy to hide their subversive agenda. They’re all just communists. That’s all we need to know, and all these petty differences are just a distraction.” This kind of attitude only benefits your opponents.<br /><br />Here are some distinctive features of the alt-right that I believe antifascists should take into consideration:<br /><br /><i>* The alt-right is strong in online tactics but weak in on-the-ground organization</i>. White supremacists have long been pioneers in exploiting new communication technologies, but the alt-right is the first far right current that exists mainly online. Alt-rightists have skillfully used online memes such as <a href="https://antifascistnews.net/2015/08/16/cuckservative-how-the-alt-right-took-off-their-masks-and-revealed-their-white-hoods/" target="_blank">#Cuckservative</a> and <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/draftourdaughters" target="_blank">#DraftOurDaughters</a> as propaganda tools to shape mainstream discourse. They have also turned <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/how-students-for-trump-terrorized-portland-state-university-88396c06c743#.a4b2wsu00" target="_blank">online harassment</a> and abuse into a potent tactic for frightening and silencing opponents. This raises important challenges for antifascists. It’s one thing to shut down a neonazi rally, or even a website, but something else again to shut down a Twitter campaign of vicious threats and abuse sent from a constantly moving array of anonymous accounts.<br /><br />On the flip side, alt-rightists have little formal organization and very limited capacity to muster supporters for in-person rallies or other events. This could change. Some alt-right groups, such as the Traditionalist Youth Network/Traditionalist Workers Party, are actively <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/07/21/meet-aryan-nationalist-alliance-%E2%80%93%E2%80%93-racist-hodgepodge-doomed-fail" target="_blank">building bridges</a> with older school white supremacist groups, in part to help increase their physical presence.<br /><br /><i>* The alt-right brings together different branches of white nationalism</i>. Some alt-rightists embrace <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/andrew-anglin" target="_blank">neonazi</a> ideology. Others emphasize a pseudoscientific “<a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/jared-taylor" target="_blank">race realism</a>” that’s heavy on IQ statistics and genetics. A third major current borrows from the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161010184122/http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/08/the-european-new-right/" target="_blank">European New Rig</a>ht, which has reworked fascist ideology using concepts borrowed from progressive movements, such as cultural diversity and identity politics. There’s overlap between these currents, and despite some infighting the alt-right has so far succeeded in maintaining a “big tent” approach and avoiding the sectarian splits that have stymied many earlier far right initiatives. But ideological difference could be a point of vulnerability.<br /><br /><i>* The alt-right encompasses rightist ideologies that don’t center on race</i>. White nationalism has been the alt-right’s center of gravity, but the movement also overlaps with other political currents, including:<br /><ul><li>the so-called <a href="http://www.gq.com/story/mens-rights-activism-the-red-pill" target="_blank">manosphere</a>, an internet subculture of men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, and others focused on destroying feminism and re-intensifying men’s dominance over women;</li><li>the <a href="https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-right-84e97225ac19#.v1ans8yqb" target="_blank">neoreactionary movement</a> (also known as the Dark Enlightenment), a network of authoritarian intellectuals who regard popular sovereignty as a major threat to civilization;</li><li>the <a href="http://newpol.org/content/rising-above-herd-keith-prestons-authoritarian-anti-statism" target="_blank">right-wing anarchism of Keith Preston</a>’s <i>Attack the System</i>, which blends opposition to big states with a kind of Nietzschean elitism;</li><li><a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/11/jack-donovan-on-men-masculine-tribalism.html" target="_blank">Jack Donovan’s male tribalism</a>, which envisions a system of patriarchy based on close-knit “gangs” of warrior men.</li></ul>These currents have significantly influenced alt-right goals, tactics, forms of organization, and political targets. They have also helped the alt-right reach out to people who may not be white supremacist — and may not even be white. This capacity to extend its reach is part of what makes the alt-right dangerous. But there has also been conflict: for example some alt-rightists <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160430035250/http://www.dailystormer.com/intensified-jewing-vox-covers-the-alt-right/" target="_blank">dismissing</a> neoreaction founder Curtis Yarvin (“Mencius Moldbug”) as a Jew, or denouncing manosphere icon and would-be ally Daryush Valizadeh (“Roosh V”) as a “<a href="http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/11/02/roosh-v-denounced-as-degenerate-muzzie-by-white-supremacists-hes-trying-to-woo/" target="_blank">greasy Iranian</a>” who defiles white women.<br /><br /><i>* The alt-right is internally divided about how to deal with Jews and gay men</i>. Antisemitism is standard across the alt-right, but it takes widely different forms. Neonazis within the alt-right regard Jews as the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161114190331/http://therightstuff.biz/2016/04/11/zero-tolerance-why-arent-white-nationalists-and-jewish-nationalists-fellow-travelers/" target="_blank">ultimate embodiment of evil</a>, who must be completely excluded from the movement and from any white homeland. But other alt-rightists want to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160910203839/http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/02/will-jews-change-sides/" target="_blank">ally with right-wing Jews</a> against Muslims and regard Israel as a healthy outlet to keep Jews from subverting white society. And some alt-rightists — notably <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/american-renaissance" target="_blank">American Renaissance</a>, one of the movement’s core institutions — welcome Jews as speakers and writers, and as participants in a future white homeland.<br /><br />Similarly, while many alt-rightists want to suppress homosexuality, others <a href="https://antifascistnews.net/2015/11/06/queer-fascism-why-white-nationalists-are-trying-to-drop-homophobia/" target="_blank">denounce homophobia</a> as a divisive force that weakens white solidarity and the male bonding needed for civilization to flourish. Some alt-rightists, such as Jack Donovan and James O’Meara, are openly homosexual. Donovan gets a lot of homophobic comments from other alt-rightists but his work is also influential and widely respected in the movement, to some extent even among homophobes. Some alt-rightists have also used Islamophobia in a bid to “<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161114184513/http://therightstuff.biz/2016/06/14/wedging-gays-and-muslims/" target="_blank">wedge gays and Muslims</a>.”<br /><br />So far, alt-rightists have kept these disagreements within bounds, but they could intensify, for example if Donald Trump pursues the strongly pro-Zionist Mideast policy he has promised.<br /><br /><i>* The alt-right is overwhelmingly male</i>. This reflects the movement’s patriarchal politics, of course, but also the boys club character of the online networks that furnish the bulk of its recruits, as well the alt-right’s general refusal to address women’s interests or concerns in any significant way. By contrast, the equally misogynistic biblical patriarchy movement has far more female participants and activists, because it at least offers women a sense of belonging and recognition, however distorted. A patriarchal family can’t exist without women, but even this kind of family is peripheral or irrelevant to male tribalism and large swaths of the manosphere.<br /><br /><i>* Most of the alt-right regards Donald Trump as a useful stepping stone</i>. Most alt-rightists supported Trump’s presidential campaign and were thrilled by his upset victories over both the GOP establishment and Hillary Clinton. But they don’t think Trump shares their politics or will bring about the white ethnostate they want. Rather, they believe a Trump presidency will give them more space to peddle their ideology and “move the Overton window” in their favor. In turn, they see themselves as the Trump coalition’s political <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-hnCe4Gvd_sJ:www.radixjournal.com/blog/2016/11/9/we-the-vanguard-now+&amp;cd=1&amp;hl=en&amp;ct=clnk&amp;gl=us&amp;client=safari" target="_blank">vanguard</a>, taking hardline positions that pull Trump further to the right while enabling him to look moderate by comparison. The alt-right’s relationship with Donald Trump has been tremendously beneficial to both parties, but it could also turn sour in any number of ways. Even as he ramps up authoritarianism, Trump will have to navigate between the alt-right and other players, above all an economic ruling class whose majority did not want him to get elected.<br /><br />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; * &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;* &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;*<br /><br />We are moving into a bleak period, when understanding the forces opposing us will be more important than ever. That means exposing supremacist ideologies in all forms and guises, but it also means developing a political vocabulary that lets us make distinctions, rather than treat all enemies as one undifferentiated mass. <br /><br /><br /><b>Related posts on <i>Three Way Fight</i>:</b><br /><a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/12/alt-right-more-misogynistic-than-many.html" target="_blank">Alt-right: more misogynistic than many neonazis</a>, December 2016Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-64834756346921714792016-10-16T21:10:00.000-04:002016-10-16T21:10:47.674-04:00Red Skies at Night article on far right anti-imperialismIssue #3 of the independent leftist journal <i><a href="http://www.redskiesatnight.net/" target="_blank">Red Skies at Night</a></i> includes my article “Anti-Imperialism and the U.S. Far Right.” Here I trace a number of historical roots of right-wing anti-imperialism, such as: <br /><ul><li>the America First movement that opposed U.S. entry into World War II,</li><li>wartime Axis support for anti-colonial struggles within the British and French empires, and&nbsp;</li><li>Francis Parker Yockey’s call for post-war fascists to ally with the USSR and Third World nationalist movements.&nbsp;</li></ul>The article also discusses the interactions between current-day far right anti-imperialist currents, including Third Position, the European New Right and its offshoots, and the Lyndon LaRouche network.<br /><br /><i>Red Skies at Night</i> #3 is available from <a href="http://www.redskiesatnight.net/order-copies.html" target="_blank">www.redskiesatnight.net/order-copies.html</a>&nbsp;for $9 within the United States. The same issue also includes articles on transformative justice, the Occupy movement, environmentalism and working class struggles, the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, Chican@ liberation, and revolutionary strategy. Check it out and help support independent radical analysis and writing!<br /><br />In “Anti-Imperialism and the U.S. Far Right,” I highlight some of the strategic questions that far rightists are facing today: <br /><blockquote><i>“First, in opposing ZOG [the ‘Zionist Occupation Government,’ i.e. Washington] or the globalist conspiracy, should they align themselves with a countervailing power (most immediately Russia, but in the long run maybe China or someone else) or pursue an independent course? Second, should they work together with non-white and non-rightist forces internationally, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran and its allies, or left-populists such as Hugo Chavez? These issues are actively being debated, and could significantly affect the kind of organizing work that far rightists do and their capacity to attract supporters.”</i></blockquote>So I was very interested to read the recent article “<a href="http://thediplomat.com/2016/10/beyond-trump-and-putin-the-american-alt-rights-love-of-the-kremlins-policies/" target="_blank">Beyond Trump and Putin: The American Alt-Right’s Love of the Kremlin’s Policies</a>” in the online journal <i>The Diplomat</i>. Author Casey Michel argues that many of the white nationalists and fascists supporting Trump’s campaign have also been praising Russian President Vladimir Putin. Matthew Heimbach of the Traditionalist Youth Network/Traditonalist Workers Party called Putin “the leader, really, of the anti-globalist forces around the world.” Richard Spencer, arguably the alt-right’s founder, recently praised Russia as “the sole white power in the world.” A number of American white nationalists, such as American Renaissance head Jared Taylor, have denounced U.S. foreign policy at political gatherings in Russia, such as the 2015 Russian Imperial Movement conference in St. Petersburg and the 2016 Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia conference in Moscow. (I wrote <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/02/moscow-conference-draws-fascists-neo.html" target="_blank">here</a> about the 2014 AGMR conference, which was also attended by various U.S. rightists, as well as by leftists associated with the Workers World Party.)<br /><br />This phenomenon doesn't mean we should accept every accusation that right-wingers are sympathizing with Moscow. Others, such as Glenn Greenwald, have <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/08/08/dems-tactic-of-accusing-adversaries-of-kremlin-ties-and-russia-sympathies-has-long-history-in-us/" target="_blank">charged</a> that the Clinton campaign and its supporters have engaged in Kremlin-baiting — using smear tactics to imply that political opponents on both the left and the right are friendly to Russia and therefore disloyal to the United States. Michel is dismissive of this concern as the work of "lefty journalists with little grasp on post-Soviet developments." I disagree. Kremlin-baiting by Clintonites is real — and far right overtures to the Russian government are also real.<br /><br />Looking beyond the alt-right, Michel reports that several Christian right leaders have also praised Putin, such as Bryan Fischer (former American Family Association spokesperson) and Franklin Graham (evangelist and son of Billy Graham). At the same time, a John Birch Society spokesperson told Michel that the U.S. “should not be partnering with countries [like Russia] that are enemies to American liberty.”<br /><br />It’s easy to find support for Michel’s argument that many alt-rightists see themselves and Putin’s Russia as on the same side. At <i>Counter-Currents Publishing</i>, a leading alt-right forum, Gregory Hood <a href="http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/09/standing-with-syria/" target="_blank">argued</a> three years ago that the alliance between Russia and Assad’s Syria represented a force for good against the evils of globalism and U.S. dominance: <br /><blockquote><i>“The United States is a revolutionary leftist power on a scale that dwarfs anything seen since the days of the French Revolution. It funds opposition to all traditional social systems, it openly defies international law in the name of a more primal creed of universal human rights, and it consistently applies diplomatic, economic, and eventually military force against what remains of Western Civilization.”<br /> * * *<br />“Syria, like its protector Russia, stands for something different. It stands for autonomy – a responsible governing class that identifies its well-being with that of continued survival of the state and the national population, not just some economic system or abstract creed. It holds that traditional social forms and cultures have a right to survival. It is under the ‘dictator’ Assad that marginalized but longstanding groups like Middle Eastern Christians or minority Islamic sects can survive in relative peace and security. It is under American-backed ‘democratic’ regimes that such populations are either persecuted or destroyed.”</i></blockquote>It would be interesting to compare this formulation with the rhetoric of those U.S. leftists who <a href="http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/left-s-hollow-anti-imperialism-over-syria-1081590395" target="_blank">defend</a> the Assad government as a supposed anti-imperialist bulwark against U.S-backed Islamist terrorism.<br /><br />But not all alt-rightists agree. At the <i>Alternative Right</i> blog, Colin Liddell <a href="http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-failure-of-putin.html" target="_blank">criticized</a> Putin’s “suppression of Russian nationalist groups and the thought crime laws he has introduced that are aimed at suppressing historical viewpoints critical of the Red Army and the Holocaust/ Holohoax narrative…” Liddell continued, “As a de facto multicultural state, Russia has to be wary of straight-forward ethno-nationalism…” — not a compliment coming from an alt-rightist. Liddell’s fellow blogger “Duns Scotus” continued in this same vein in “<a href="http://alternative-right.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-boundless-insanity-of-neo-russian.html" target="_blank">The Boundless Insanity of Neo-Russian Imperialism</a>”: “Along with its geopolitical, temporal, and ideological borderlessness, the Russian imperialist entity…believes firmly in racial, religious, and ethnic borderlessness. Muslims, Jews, atheists, Christians—are all weighed and balanced only in as much as they serve the imperialist entity and its essentially soulless interests.”<br /><br />I have written <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/07/making-america-worse.html" target="_blank">previously</a> that most white nationalists’ support for Donald Trump is qualified and opportunistic. They see his campaign as useful, but don’t believe he will bring about the changes they want. Maybe their support for Putin is conditional in the same way. Whether they choose sides or not, U.S. far rightists are an autonomous force, not tools of a foreign power.<br /><br /><i>Thanks to Michael Pugliese for pointing me to Casey Michel's article.</i>Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-52575900562258827922016-07-16T16:45:00.000-04:002016-07-16T16:45:24.919-04:00Making America Worse<i>[This is the text of a talk that I gave at the event "Trump, White Supremacy, Fascism? Building New Resistance Movements!" on June 25, 2016, in Brooklyn, New York. My thanks to Resistance in Brooklyn, sponsors of the event, for the invitation to speak.]</i><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Sf64GnvKhoM/V4j1k3DjfvI/AAAAAAAAAJI/QmJkXvQSuRkHp9sqxo9XOP5Zqbt9E-uHACLcB/s1600/Donald_Trump_by_Gage_Skidmore_6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Sf64GnvKhoM/V4j1k3DjfvI/AAAAAAAAAJI/QmJkXvQSuRkHp9sqxo9XOP5Zqbt9E-uHACLcB/s640/Donald_Trump_by_Gage_Skidmore_6.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;">Donald Trump speaking at a campaign rally in Fountain Hills, Arizona, 19 March 2016</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />I want to start by reading a couple of quotes. This first one is by Teju Cole and it’s from Facebook this past December:<br /><blockquote><i>“Trump is a dangerous clown, and we must continue to strongly oppose him and his hateful crowds. But it is important to understand that his idea of ‘banning all Muslims,’ scandalous as it is…, is far less scandalous than the past dozen years of American disregard for non-American Muslim lives…. Trump didn’t murder thousands of innocent people with drones in Pakistan and Yemen. Trump didn’t kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people with bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump didn’t torture people at Baghram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, or the numerous black sites across the planet. Trump’s weapons aren’t incinerating Yemen now, and didn’t blow up Gaza last year. No American president in the past fourteen years has openly championed Islamophobia, but none has refrained from doing to Muslims overseas what would be unthinkable to do here to Americans of any religion.”</i></blockquote>The other quote I want to read is by Mark Rupert. This is also from Facebook, just last month:<br /><blockquote><i>“The US now has a massive, institutionalized, globally active surveillance and assassination apparatus…. The President routinely authorizes extrajudicial killings of suspected terrorists along with anyone who happens to be in the vicinity. Within the ‘homeland’ we are monitored as never before by the national security state. Our police forces are militarized so that even small towns have armored vehicles and swat teams. People of color are routinely killed by police with apparent impunity. Muslim religious communities have been singled out for surveillance and infiltration by law enforcement agencies at all levels. The immigration enforcement apparatus has been massively expanded, and immigration agents act effectively without constitutional restraints within a zone extending 100 miles from all US borders. <br /><br />“Now imagine all of that in the hands of a racist, authoritarian narcissist with millions of militant followers who love him precisely for those characteristics and the ‘bold and strong’ actions that reflect them, and who are prepared to scapegoat racial and religious others for seemingly intractable social problems that will not be getting better anytime soon in the absence of radical social change.<br /><br />“Now add in the real possibility of another major terrorist attack. Or two. Or three. Or urban unrest sparked by concentrated poverty and hyper-policing of these ‘zones of disposability’.<br /><br />“What kind of America are you imagining right now?”</i></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Both of these quotes help us put Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in context — but they put the emphasis in different places. On one hand, Trump’s racist and authoritarian politics don’t come out of nowhere, and they don’t even just grow out of the Republican Party. They grow out of a system that practices large-scale repression and murder, under both Republicans and Democrats.<br /><br />On the other hand, it’s a mistake to say that it doesn’t matter whether Trump becomes president or not. Because bad as things are now, Trump has the potential to make them qualitatively worse.<br /><br />Donald Trump has taken naked bigotry and hate mongering to levels way beyond any major presidential candidate in decades. He has called for massive use of state power against immigrants and against Muslim Americans. He has advocated the use of torture. He has called for stifling freedom of the press. He has encouraged his supporters to use physical violence against opponents. And he has presented himself as a political savior who alone has the strength and the will and the vision to lead America back to greatness.<br /><br />So it’s not surprising that many people have called Donald Trump a fascist. It <i>is</i> surprising that this charge hasn’t just come from leftists and liberals — it’s also come from conservatives, libertarians, and even prominent members of his own Republican party. If people across the political spectrum are calling Trump a fascist, maybe that’s all the more reason to say the shoe fits. One the other hand, if Trump is being called a fascist by mainstream politicians who support a vast national security state, murderous military policies, and big subsidies for wealthy capitalists, are these politicians speaking out of concern for democracy or to make themselves look more legitimate by comparison?<br /><br />The question of “what is fascism?” is a complex, emotionally loaded topic that we could talk about for hours. Even among leftists, there’s no consensus about how to even go about defining fascism. Is it based on certain ideological characteristics, or a particular relationship of class forces? Is it a political process? Is it stage of capitalism? So let’s talk about fascism, but let’s not get too fixated on the word. Because what’s more important is how we analyze the situation, and what we decide to do about it.<br /><br />As a political category, fascism isn’t an objective thing — it’s a tool for analysis, a tool for making connections and distinctions between different political movements or regimes. Definitions of fascism aren’t objectively true, they’re just more or less useful in helping us understand political developments, and helping us choose a course of action. Some people say, the only time we should call a movement fascist is if it looks almost exactly like the movements that Hitler and Mussolini led in the 1930s. That’s not very useful, because far right politics has changed a lot since 1945, or even since 1975. Some other people say, any example of right-wing authoritarianism, especially one that’s racist or militaristic, is either fascist or something close to it. That’s not very useful either, because it lumps together widely different kinds of politics under one label. I wrote about this in 2007 in an article titled, “Is the Bush administration fascist?”:<br /><blockquote><i>“militaristic repression -- even full-scale dictatorship -- doesn't necessarily equal fascism, and the distinction matters. Some forms of right-wing authoritarianism grow out of established political institutions while others reject those institutions; some are creatures of big business while others are independent of, or even hostile to, big business. Some just suppress liberatory movements while others use twisted versions of radical politics in a bid to ‘take the game away from the left.’ These are different kinds of threats. If we want to develop effective strategies for fighting them, we need a political vocabulary that recognizes their differences.”</i></blockquote>In my political vocabulary, authoritarian conservatism wants to defend the old order, and generally relies on top-down forms of control, while a fascist movement is a kind of right-wing oppositional politics, which uses a popular mass mobilization in a bid to throw out the political establishment and create a new kind of hierarchical, supremacist, or genocidal system. Fascism is a specific kind of right-wing populism. That means it claims to rally “the people” against sinister elites, but the way it defines elites is at least simplistic (like “greedy bankers”) and usually poisonous (like “greedy Jewish bankers”). Right-wing populism combines this twisted anti-elitism with stepped up attacks against oppressed and marginalized communities. Right-wing populism tends to have a special appeal for middle-level groups in the social hierarchy — notably middle- and working-class white people — who feel beaten down by a system they don’t control but also want to defend their relative privilege against challenges from oppressed communities below.<br /><br />Most right-wing populist movements accept the established political framework, but fascism doesn’t. Fascism rejects liberal-pluralist institutions and principles and wants to impose its totalitarian ideology on all spheres of society. In this sense, fascism is a kind of right-wing, revolutionary politics. It doesn’t want revolution in any liberatory sense, but it wants to throw out the old political class, build a new system of rule, and transform the culture so that everyone is loyal to the same ideas and the same values. Fascism doesn’t abolish class society, but it may radically transform it, as the Nazis did when they reinstituted a system of racially based slave labor in the heart of industrial Europe.<br /><br />How does all this related to Donald Trump and his campaign? I’m afraid I’m not going to give you a simple answer, because I think the issue is complicated, and it’s also a story that’s still being written. Trump’s campaign has a mix of fascist and non-fascist characteristics, and it represents several different kinds of threats. If Trump is elected president, he will certainly make the United States a more authoritarian and more supremacist society. I think he would probably do this within the framework of the existing political system, and would not be able to impose a full-scale dictatorship — but I could be wrong about that. And whether Trump wins or loses in November, even if he loses by a lot, his campaign has already helped to revitalize the white nationalist far right in this country. Four more years of another centrist neoliberal president will only make that movement stronger.<br /><br />Let me unpack all that a bit. Clearly, the Trump campaign is an example of right-wing populism. It’s a vortex of rage defending white, male, heterosexual privilege, but it’s also a scathing rejection of the political establishment, both liberal and conservative. Trump’s positions don’t necessarily follow the mainstream conservative script, but they do closely follow the examples set by earlier right-wing populist candidates such as Pat Buchanan and George Wallace. Like Buchanan in the 1990s, Trump claims to defend native-born American workers against both immigrants taking their jobs and multinational capitalists moving their jobs overseas. Like George Wallace in the 1960s, Trump supports some “liberal” measures — such as protecting Social Security and raising the minimum wage — that directly benefit his white working- and middle-class base. This echoes the standard fascist claim to be “neither left nor right.”<br /><br />The Trump campaign also has many of the trappings we associate with fascism: the cult of a great leader; glorification of violence; &nbsp;contempt for weakness; an emphasis on emotionally cathartic pageantry over substantive policy; and brazen, systematic lying.<br /><br />But there are also some important differences. A key part of fascist politics centers on building an organized mass movement, but Trump hasn’t even built much of a campaign organization, let alone any sort of active political network that would live on past November. Also, fascism makes it a priority to impose its ideology on all institutions and all spheres of society, but it’s not clear that Donald Trump actually believes in much of anything except his own importance. Without a committed ideology or an organized popular base, a President Trump would certainly grab as much personal power as he could and use racist persecution and scapegoating to keep his supporters happy, but it’s hard to imagine him leading a fascist revolutionary transformation of society.<br /><br />But even if the Trump campaign itself isn’t a fascist movement, it’s helping to build one. Trump’s anti-immigrant racism, coupled with his contempt for the conservative establishment, has won him praise from many white nationalist far rightists — the people who want to overthrow multicultural America, or at least secede from it and create an “ethno-state” for white people. Although some white nationalists say that Trump is just another tool of Zionist, Jewish interests, most of them support his campaign. They love that he wants to stop all Muslims from entering the U.S. and end birthright citizenship, and that he has broken the taboo against open racism in mainstream politics. At the same time, white nationalists are clear that Trump is not one of them and isn’t going to make the changes they want. As one blogger put it, “We need to take advantage of Trump, not allow Trump to take advantage of us.” A lot of them are hoping that Trump will weaken or even destroy the Republican Party, to help clear the ground for their version of right-wing politics.<br /><br />The most dynamic branch of far right politics in the United States today is the so-called “alt-right,” which is short for alternative right. The alt-right mostly exists online and presents itself as new, hip, and irreverent. With some exceptions, most alt-rightists don’t have direct connections with the neonazi and Klan groups of recent decades. Alt-right politics centers on white nationalism but it overlaps with various other right-wing subcultures such as the so-called manosphere, which is anti-feminist and often viciously misogynistic, and the neoreactionary movement, which is an arcane, elitist offshoot of libertarianism. The alt-right ranges from intellectual-sounding journals and conferences to blogs and chat forums that specialize in aggressive insults and mockery. Trump’s candidacy has given them all a big boost.<br /><br />In return, alt-rightists have helped out the Trump campaign in various ways. The American Freedom Party, which is tiny but has been a mouthpiece for alt-right ideas, funded pro-Trump robocalls in Iowa before the caucuses there. More importantly, alt-rightists have used their internet propaganda skills. In the lead-up to the first Republican presidential debate last summer, alt-rightists on social media promoted the internet meme “hashtag-cuckservative” to attack the mainstream Republican candidates as traitors and sellouts to liberalism. “Cuckservative” combines the words “conservative” and “cuckold,” meaning a man whose wife has sex with other men. It’s implicitly racist because cuckold also refers to a genre of porn in which passive white husbands watch their wives have sex with black men. The cuckservative meme got a lot of attention and helped shift the political climate in Trump’s favor.<br /><br />A small-scale example happened this Spring at Portland State University, where the group Students for Trump used alt-right tactics to harass anti-Trump protesters. They used anonymous social media accounts to send hundreds of racist, transphobic, and antisemitic messages to the protesters, along with rape and death threats, and also publicized where the protesters lived and worked to make them more vulnerable. These same tactics have been used by manosphere activists to harass and intimidate feminists, as in the so-called Gamergate controversy of a couple of years ago. The Trump campaign has helped bring such tactics back into mainstream electoral politics.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><br />This summer, almost certainly, the Democratic Party will nominate Hillary Clinton for president, and the Republicans will nominate Donald Trump. Ordinarily I don’t give much credence to the argument that leftists should support the Democrats as the lesser evil, because I think the way you lessen evil is by combatting it, by building liberatory movements that make it difficult or impossible for the rulers to do what they want to do. But this year I feel conflicted. If elected, either Clinton or Trump will build up the machinery of state repression even more, widen economic inequality even further, deport more immigrants and refugees, and rain more bombs on civilians in other countries. What I’m struggling with is this: If Trump is elected, I think it’s very possible that meetings such as this one will no longer be able to take place in public. Building liberatory movements will become a lot more difficult than it would be under Clinton, and a lot more of that work will have to happen underground. On the other hand, if we as leftists lend our support to the candidate of neoliberalism, if we ally ourselves with the bulk of the ruling class, we are telling millions of angry, disempowered people that the only real opposition, the only real political alternative, is on the right. And bad as the Trump campaign is, the next version of that opposition may be even worse.<br /><br /><b>Photo credit:</b><br />Photo by Gage Skidmore via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/22007612@N05/25858555481" target="_blank">Flickr</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" target="_blank">(CC BY-SY 2.0)</a>Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-35900043450471174742016-05-14T10:08:00.000-04:002016-05-14T10:08:40.666-04:00Racist Revolutionaries: The Alt-Right Uprising? (radio program)The alternative right or alt-right movement is a new incarnation of white nationalism that has&nbsp; coalesced in recent years. The alt-right has gained attention over the past year because of its support for Donald Trump's presidential candidacy and promotion of the <a href="https://antifascistnews.net/2015/08/16/cuckservative-how-the-alt-right-took-off-their-masks-and-revealed-their-white-hoods/" target="_blank">#cuckservative</a> meme to attack mainstream conservatives.<br /><br />I was recently interviewed by radio journalist Dan Young for a program about the alt-right that he produced for WFHB-FM, a community radio station in Bloomington, Indiana. The program, entitled "Racist Revolutionaries: The Alt-Right Uprising?" was broadcast on May 10th on WFHB's <i>Interchange</i> series. It's available as a podcast <a href="http://wfhb.org/news/interchange-racist-revolutionaries-the-alt-right-uprising/" target="_blank">here</a>. Using clips from speeches and articles by alt-right figures such as <a href="http://www.irehr.org/2014/06/27/who-is-richard-spencer/" target="_blank">Richard Spencer</a>, <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2011/05/rising-above-herd-keith-prestons.html" target="_blank">Keith Preston</a>, and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/matthew-heimbach" target="_blank">Matthew Heimbach</a>, the program offers an excellent analysis of the movement's ideology, branches, activities, appropriation of anti-colonial and anti-oppression themes, and relationship with the Trump campaign. Here's an excerpt from the <a href="http://wfhb.org/news/interchange-racist-revolutionaries-the-alt-right-uprising/" target="_blank">description</a> on the WFHB website: <blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>"You’ll hear in what follows how the 'Alt-Right' often takes liberal or left terminologies and turns these upside down to serve a racist, segregationist, and white supremacist agenda. You’ll hear terms like 'race realism' and 'identitarian' and even 'peaceful ethnic cleansing'–words and phrases crafted to sound sensible, thoughtful, civil. At one point you’ll hear a 19th century canard coming out of the mouth of one of these 'conversos' to 'race realism'–that 'people of color' are not sufficiently advanced in civilization to 'handle' freedom. It doesn’t take a village; it takes a white master."</i></blockquote>(My interview was mostly used as background for the segment, but there's a short clip of me speaking about 32 minutes in.)<br /><br />For more about the alt-right, see the excellent coverage at <i>AntiFascistNews.net</i>, such as "<a href="https://antifascistnews.net/2015/12/18/alternative-internet-racism-alt-right-and-the-new-fascist-branding/" target="_blank">Alternative Internet Racism: Alt Right and the New Fascist Branding</a>" and "<a href="https://antifascistnews.net/2016/04/05/going-full-fash-breitbart-mainstreams-the-alt-right/" target="_blank">Going Full Fash: Breitbart Mainstreams the 'Alt Right'</a>." See also my 2010 article "<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/09/alternativerightcom-paleoconservatism.html" target="_blank"><i>AlternativeRight.com</i>: Paleoconservatism for the 21st Century</a>," about the online journal that gave the alt-right its name. I didn't realize back then that <i>AlternativeRight.com</i> was already moving beyond paleoconservatism, but otherwise the article holds up pretty well.<br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-66007205966553010592016-03-15T09:24:00.001-04:002016-03-19T22:15:40.474-04:00Trump: “anti-political” or right wing?<br /><i>[See new post-script at the end of this article.]</i><br /><br />Some leftists have declared recently that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is fundamentally “anti-political” rather than right wing. But the evidence they offer actually highlights the similarities between Trump and earlier right-wing populist candidates Patrick Buchanan and George Wallace. This debate also highlights the need to combat both Trump’s demagoguery <i>and</i> the political establishment he is railing against.<br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-odR6-FIUh54/VugDkungFXI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/Rv7_Y-YBP4w_diUwK_zGCK0bqExgjfHlg/s1600/Trump_protest_Chicago_March_11%252C_2016.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="425" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-odR6-FIUh54/VugDkungFXI/AAAAAAAAAIQ/Rv7_Y-YBP4w_diUwK_zGCK0bqExgjfHlg/s640/Trump_protest_Chicago_March_11%252C_2016.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif;">Protest at Donald Trump Rally in Chicago on March 11, 2016</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><b>A revolt against the political class</b><br /><a href="http://left-flank.org/2016/01/25/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left/" target="_blank">Tad Tietze</a>&nbsp;on the blog&nbsp;<i>Left Flank</i>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="http://socialistworker.org/2016/03/09/trumpism-and-socialist-strategy" target="_blank">James Robertson</a>&nbsp;in&nbsp;<i>Socialist Worker</i>&nbsp;(newspaper of the International Socialist Organization) both argue that Trump’s campaign is anti-political in the sense that it centers on attacking the political establishment while ignoring conventional ideological categories. Robertson and Tietze acknowledge that on immigration and Muslims, Trump has staked out more vitriolic positions than any other candidate, but they contend that Trump is actually to the left of the other Republican candidates on a wide range of issues. More specifically, writes Tietze,<br /><blockquote>“Trump argues for: protectionist trade policies as part of massively reinvigorating industrial production to create quality jobs;… more funding for schools and health services; replacing Obamacare with a system that brings the insurance companies to heel (until recently he’d even supported single-payer); and rebuilding crumbling infrastructure. It’s a fairly traditional populist, government-led pitch of growing the economy (and the government) out of its problems…”</blockquote>Robertson offers further examples:<br /><blockquote>“Take, for instance, Trump's unexpectedly aggressive attack on the Bush presidency for lying about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ to justify the Iraq War. Or his recent call for the U.S. to play a more ‘neutral’ roe in the Israel/Palestine conflict--a sharp (and controversial) break with the staunchly pro-Israel GOP.<br /><br />“On domestic issues, too, Trump has been a volatile candidate. Upon the death of Antonin Scalia, he distanced himself from the judge’s attack on affirmative action. Likewise, on abortion, Trump has consistently marked himself as a moderate (relative to his competitors, at least).”</blockquote>This mix of positions, Tietze and Robertson argue, doesn’t make sense in ideological terms, but is consistent as expression of Trump’s central message: that the current political class is (in Tietze’s words) “inept, bought-off, beholden to corporate donors, and too ineffectual to take the decisive action needed to fix America’s problems.”<br /><br />Tietze thinks that we shouldn't take Trump’s racist rhetoric too seriously. He claims it's simply Trump's way of showing up the political establishment’s weakness and “attracting attention by causing an uproar,” and that Trump “has started to soften his pitch” as his campaign has gotten stronger. Tietze argues further that “Trump’s strongest support is from GOP voters who self-identify as ‘moderate/liberal,’” and that it’s a mistake to interpret his popularity as “some kind of significant radicalisation on the Right,” as many leftists and others have done.<br /><br />Robertson's version of the argument is more sophisticated. He acknowledges that Trump has exploited racist and nativist sentiments and that “there does appear to be a general correlation between support for Trump and racist attitudes.” He notes further that “a hardcore minority of the crowd [at Trump rallies] supports and even revels in racist violence” and that “certain groups on the radical right have seen in Trump’s campaign an opportunity to amplify their messages.” But in the end, he says, “Trump's anti-politics are not an add-on to his racist ideology. Rather, his racist outbursts supplement his anti-political campaign.” In his view, identifying Trump too closely with the far right “underestimates the malleability of his anti-political strategy,” which sometimes involves taking anti-racist positions, such as support for removing the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina capitol building. It also risks “overstating the size and influence of the far right” in the U.S., which despite recent growth remains “marginalized and, on the whole, weak and fragmented.”<br /><br />To Robertson, Trump’s ideological flexibility “highlights his lack of a social base. He has no significant institutional backing, no real roots in any broad social formations.” This “allows him to position himself in as most divisive a way as possible and so occupy the space of the ‘anti-establishment’ most effectively.” It also means that the “Trump phenomenon is doomed to be ephemeral” and has limited “capacity to fundamentally shift the political landscape.”<br /><br /><b>A backlash against noeliberalism</b><br />A related analysis comes from <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support" target="_blank">Thomas Frank</a>, writing in <i>The Guardian</i>. Although Frank doesn’t use the term “anti-political” and doesn’t call Trump’s impact “ephemeral,” he agrees with Tietze and Robertson that racism isn’t the best way to explain Trump’s appeal. He argues that Trump’s popularity has more to do with his “left wing” ideas: such as calling for competitive bidding in the drug industry, criticizing arms industry lobbyists, and, above all, denouncing free trade — which seems irrational to the professional class but resonates for millions of working people hurt by deindustrialization:<br /><blockquote>“Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.”</blockquote>Frank cites a survey of white working-class voters in suburban Cleveland and Pittsburgh that was conducted by Working America, an AFL-CIO affiliate:<br /><blockquote>“Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his ‘attitude,’ the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, ‘immigration’ placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: ‘good jobs / the economy.’”</blockquote>Frank has no illusions that Trump actually cares about workers, but argues that his criticisms of free trade “articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades.” Reducing Trump’s appeal to the single issue of racism obscures this reality.<br /><blockquote>“We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.”</blockquote><b>Echoes of Buchanan and Wallace</b><br />These articles raise issues that need to be addressed. As Tietze, Robertson, and Frank contend, Trump’s message and popularity can’t be reduced to racism alone. The articles are helpful for focusing attention on Trump’s hostility to the political establishment and for detailing some of the ways he doesn’t sound like a conservative.<br /><br />But it’s frustrating that all three of these authors write as if conservatism is the only kind of right-wing politics, and that all three of them treat Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric as separate from, and at odds with, his racism. In reality, combining crude or distorted anti-elitism with scapegoating and attacks against oppressed communities is the very essence of right-wing populism. That’s not a new idea, and it’s certainly not a new phenomenon.<br /><br />To take this further, the specific ways that Trump combines overtly right-wing and “moderate” or “liberal” positions closely track earlier right-wing populist presidential candidates, specifically Pat Buchanan and George Wallace. Both Buchanan and Wallace ran campaigns in which ethnoreligious bigotry and reasserting white dominance played a major role. But both of them combined this with anti-establishment positions which, in different ways, broke with conservative orthodoxy.<br /><br />Buchanan (who ran in the Republican presidential primaries in 1992 and 1996, and on the Reform Party ticket in 2000) is a paleoconservative whose campaigns evoked the economic protectionism and military anti-interventionism of the Old Right. When Donald Trump criticizes free trade agreements, he sounds like Buchanan denouncing “the predatory traders of Europe and Asia” who threatened American industry and jobs. When Trump attacks the Bush administration for falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” or calls for the U.S. to play a more “neutral” role between Israel and Palestine, he sounds like Buchanan opposing the drive toward war with Iraq in 1990 and denouncing the United States’ close alliance with Israel. When Trump criticizes arms industry lobbyists, he sounds like Buchanan opposing “unfettered capitalism.”<br /><br />Some rightists have recognized these parallels. Former Reagan budget staffer David Stockman <a href="http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/the-donald-the-good-and-bad-of-it/" target="_blank">writes</a>,<br /><blockquote>“The Donald is tapping a nationalist/isolationist impulse that runs deep among a weary and economically precarious main street public. He is clever enough to articulate it in the bombast of what sounds like a crude trade protectionism. Yet if Pat Buchanan were to re-write his speech, it would be more erudite and explicit about the folly of the American Imperium, but the message would be the same.”</blockquote>Justin Raimondo, an anti-interventionist libertarian who runs the website <i><a href="http://antiwar.com/">Antiwar.com</a></i> and who supported Buchanan’s presidential campaigns, <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/02/28/the-lion-and-the-sheep/" target="_blank">argues</a> that “Trump represents a deadly challenge to the high command of the War Party – the neoconservatives who lied us into war in Iraq – and were called out for it by him.” Although Raimondo is not a Trump supporter, he believes that<br /><blockquote>“If Trump secures the nomination, the way is paved for transforming the GOP from the party of perpetual war to the party that honors the long-forgotten ‘isolationist’ Sen. Robert A. Taft… And if Trump actually wins the White House, the military-industrial complex is finished, along with the globalists who dominate foreign policy circles in Washington.”</blockquote>George Wallace’s brand of right-wing populism was different. Although he ran in the Democratic presidential primaries three times, Wallace is better remembered for his 1968 run on the American Independent Party ticket. His 1968 campaign defended segregation but downplayed explicit racism; it denounced centralized government but — as part of Wallace’s appeal to working-class whites — embraced welfare state policies. Many of Donald Trump’s more “liberal” domestic positions, such as expanding education funding and rebuilding infrastructure, are like a muted version of what Wallace advocated 48 years ago, such as higher Social Security payments, universal access to medical care, and a guaranteed right to collective bargaining. Because of these positions, Wallace was called a liberal by Republican opponents, much as Trump is today.<br /><br />Only if we ignore this history does it make sense to call Trump’s message “inconsistent,” “irrational,” or “chaotic.” Not all of Trump’s positions follow right-wing populist precedent, but most of them do, and even the outliers may follow a related logic. For example, Michelle Goldberg <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/02/donald_trump_s_planned_parenthood_heresy_in_gop_debate.html" target="_blank">suggests</a> that Trump’s refusal to demonize Planned Parenthood (he wants to defund it for performing abortions, yet points out that it helps millions of women with other health services) is reassuring to “downwardly mobile white voters who hear how terrible Planned Parenthood is… but who nevertheless rely on the organization for reproductive health care.” That’s an eminently rational approach to take if you want to build a right-wing populist campaign that stands apart from your conventional conservative rivals.<br /><br /><b>A right-wing realignment</b><br />A classic hallmark of right-wing populist movements is that they attract people in the middle echelons of the social hierarchy, who have genuine grievances against economic and political elites above them, but also want to defend their limited, relative privilege against challenges from oppressed groups below. Right-wing populism takes that mix of resentments and channels it in ways that reinforce oppression and hierarchy. This describes Trump’s campaign perfectly.<br /><br />I can well believe that only a fraction of Trump’s supporters are drawn to his campaign because they they’re actively committed to racist ideology. And while a willingness to <i>ignore</i> racism is certainly a minimum requirement for supporting Trump, that’s not unusual. Millions of white Americans, including many Trump opponents, ignore racism all the time. So it’s true that Trump isn’t just tapping into some pre-existing white nationalist constituency — instead, he is building one. By melding anger against Washington politicians with hatred and fear of Mexicans, Muslims, and people of color in general; by identifying political honesty with open expressions of bigotry; by turning his rallies into events where racist and anti-leftist violence is treated as normal and good; and by giving his followers an iconoclastic leader to rally around, Trump is doing his part to reverse the white nationalist right’s weakness and fragmentation that Robertson finds so reassuring.<br /><br />Against Robertson’s belief that Trump is just a “chaos candidate” who’s unlikely to build anything of lasting impact, I see Trump as the current focal point for an increasingly coherent and dangerous right-wing challenge to neoliberalism. Benjamin Studebaker <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/benjamin-studebaker/why-bernie-sanders-is-more-electable_b_9219882.html" target="_blank">argues</a> persuasively that this is one after-effect of the 2008 economic crisis.<br /><blockquote>“Economic ideologies change when there is an economic disaster that is seen to discredit the prevailing ideology. The Great Depression discredited the classical economics practiced by right wingers like Calvin Coolidge, allowing for left wing policies that in the 1920s would have sounded insane to ordinary people. The stagflation in the '70s discredited the Keynesian egalitarianism of FDR and LBJ, allowing Ronald Reagan to implement right wing policies that would have been totally unthinkable to people living in the 1960s.<br /><br />“I submit to you that the 2008 economic crisis and the stagnation that has followed have discredited the neoliberal economic ideology of Reagan and Clinton… for supporters of both parties, and that new policies and candidates are possible now that would have been totally unthinkable to people as recently as 10 years ago.”</blockquote>Studebaker argues that neoliberalism has dominated both major parties since Jimmy Carter’s presidency in the 1970s, but now it’s being challenged from two sides: on one side Bernie Sanders’s “left egalitarianism” (essentially an updated version of the New Deal and the Great Society), on the other the “right nationalism” of both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. And while neoliberals will likely keep control of the Democratic Party this year (via a Hillary Clinton nomination), Trump’s prospects to bring about a realignment of the Republican Party are all too strong.<br /><br /><b>What should we do?</b><br />As I’ve discussed <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/10/on-trump-fascism-and-stale-social.html" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/12/trumps-impact-fascist-upsurge-is-just.html" target="_blank">here</a>, and <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/01/fascist-revolution-doesnt-turn-back.html" target="_blank">here</a>, I think it’s a mistake to call Trump a fascist, but his campaign is emboldening the fascist far right, promoting open bigotry and violence, and intensifying the authoritarian and supremacist tendencies of the existing political order. In the likely contest between right nationalist Trump and neoliberal Clinton, Clinton is the less disastrous option, but she is closely identified with many of the disastrous policies that have <a href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/How-the-Clintons-Made-Donald-Trumps-Candidacy-Possible-20160303-0027.html" target="_blank">fueled support for Trump</a> in the first place. Arun Gupta, astute critic of <a href="http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Crash-and-Bern-20150805-0012.html" target="_blank">what electoral politics does to movement building</a>, takes a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/arun.gupta.75054689/posts/10153568937272568" target="_blank">flexible approach</a> to this dilemma that's worth quoting:<br /><blockquote>“If you live in a true swing state, cast a ballot for Clinton…. This is a tactical choice, not an endorsement of the odious Clintons. But if you don’t vote, I won’t condemn you, especially if you are in the streets opposing whoever assumes office in January 2017…. My energy, as always, is going into independent political action. While Trump is uniquely dangerous and must be stopped, the left needs to build a movement that has the support, flexibility, and creativity to make the work difficult of whichever barbaric party wins the presidential election.”</blockquote>Sixteen years ago, in <i>Right-Wing Populism in America</i>, Chip Berlet and I called for a two-pronged strategy to deal with this kind of threat: broad alliances to expose and confront rightist scapegoating and violence, but also radical initiatives to attack the structural inequalities that right-wing populism exploits, and to challenge centrism and liberalism’s harmful and repressive policies. This same dual approach remains necessary today.<br /><br />I support Chip’s <a href="http://www.politicalresearch.org/2015/12/12/trumping-democracy-right-wing-populism-fascism-and-the-case-for-action/#sthash.C1qTsCIl.dpbs" target="_blank">urgent call</a> for “organizing now to protect the people being demonized and scapegoated as targets of White rage,” and to “build broad and diverse local coalitions that tactically address local issues while strategically linking them to national struggles.” I also support Dave Zirin’s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/edgeofsports/posts/10154088731803474" target="_blank">call</a> on Facebook to “build a fighting left that challenges what Trump is giving voice to: white nationalism as a response to the crisis people feel in their lives.” As Zirin urges, “Every Trump rally should be protested and disrupted…. Repeat: Every Trump rally should be protested and disrupted.” The recent protest at a Trump rally in Chicago — <a href="http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trump-protesters-20160312-story.html" target="_blank">spearheaded</a> by black, Latino, and Muslim university students — won an important tactical victory when Trump cancelled the event rather than face his opponents.<br /><br />But even forceful protests like Chicago are basically defensive, just one part of what’s needed. The other part is to cut off right-wing populism at the root. Tietze, Robertson, and Frank are correct that Trump’s campaign is fueled by rage at the neoliberal establishment, so if we want to cut off that support, we need to give people better ways to channel that rage, radical alternatives that speak to their reality. At the same time that we combat bigotry and scapegoating, we need to find ways to engage politically with the working- and middle-class whites who are currently being drawn to Trump’s campaign. Clare Bayard of the <a href="http://collectiveliberation.org/" target="_blank">Catalyst Project</a> <a href="https://healingandjustice.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/defeating-the-soldiers-of-misfortune/" target="_blank">wrote</a> about this challenge two months ago, in a blog post about the Patriot movement occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon:<br /><blockquote>“How do we scale up the scrappy efforts currently underway by grassroots organizations [such as the <a href="http://www.rop.org/" target="_blank">Rural Organizing Project</a>, is a statewide community organizing project in Oregon] to meet the needs of impoverished, isolated rural communities, as well as working-class and poor urban communities? How do we diminish the appeal of groups like the 3%s, Oath Keepers, and other paramilitaries formations that are speaking to peoples’ fears and the hatred that has been manufactured over generations by people with an interest in distracting us all from whose hands are actually in our pockets? And compete with the real way they are speaking to the material needs of people who are struggling to get by and do not feel supported or valued?<br /><div style="text-align: center;">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; *</div>“What is the deep work of healing that needs to happen for the people whose humanity is in such distress that they rally with guns at mosques, and how can we seriously engage that work while also prioritizing protection for the people they stalk?”</blockquote>I certainly don’t know the answers to Clare’s questions, although I expect there’s a lot to be learned from groups such as the Rural Organizing Project, as well as earlier examples such as the <a href="http://jamestracybooks.org/2016/01/28/revolutionary-hillbilly-an-interview-with-hy-thurman-of-the-young-patriots-organization/" target="_blank">Young Patriots Organization</a>, a radical group formed in 1968 Chicago mostly by poor whites from the South. But this issue is important: it is one of the most important challenges we face.<br /><br /><b>Image credit:</b><br />Photo by nathanmac87, via <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trump_protest_Chicago_March_11,_2016.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a> (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License</a>).<br /><br /><b>Postscript,&nbsp;3/19/2016</b><b>:</b><i> Some readers have criticized this article as under-playing the role of racism and Islamophobia in mobilizing Trump supporters. I accept this criticism. At points in the article it sounds like I’m saying that anti-elitism is the main reason people are rallying to Trump, and that’s really not what I meant to say. Trump is certainly using racial and religious scapegoating to mobilize people, extending and intensifying the kind of scapegoating that other politicians have perpetrated for years. And while you can find serious examples of racism in all of the other major campaigns — from Cruz to Clinton to Sanders — the Trump campaign is in a class by itself. There is clear evidence that Trump supporters are significantly more likely to express “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/02/28/what-differentiates-trump-supporters-from-other-republicans-ethnocentrism/" target="_blank">white ethnocentrism</a>” and <a href="http://www.salon.com/2016/03/18/the_secret_to_trumps_success_new_research_sheds_light_on_the_gop_frontrunners_stunning_staying_power/" target="_blank">anti-Muslim bigotry</a> than are others polled, including other Republicans.&nbsp;</i><br /><i><br />But I don’t think that’s enough to explain Trump’s appeal. Because railing against the political establishment is also a big part of his message, and a big part of what people say they like about him. I think it’s the combination of ethnoreligious scapegoating <i><b>and</b></i>&nbsp;twisted anti-elitism that’s key here, as it has been over and over in U.S. political history. If we ignore that combination and say it’s simply racism, we’re missing something important, just as Frank, Robertson, and Tietze miss something important by minimizing or denying racism’s role.</i>Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-82065059864283095512016-01-06T21:20:00.000-05:002016-01-09T19:59:00.730-05:00Fascist revolution doesn’t turn back the clock: a reply to Alexander Reid Ross on Trump<a href="https://itsgoingdown.org/trumpism-pt-4-conservative-revolution/" target="_blank">Part 4</a> of Alexander Reid Ross’s series on “Trumpism” on the website <i>It’s Going Down</i> is largely a reply to my piece “<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/12/trumps-impact-fascist-upsurge-is-just.html" target="_blank">Trump’s impact: a fascist upsurge is just one of the dangers</a>.” Reid Ross makes some valid criticisms and other good points, but he also he misrepresents my position and fails to address my main criticism of his.<br /><br />In “Trump’s impact” I argued that Donald Trump’s campaign embodies important elements of fascist politics, has fomented racist and Islamophobic bigotry and violence, and promotes many themes that help organized fascists do their work. I also argued more generally — as I’ve argued for years — that it’s a serious mistake to treat fascism as radically separate from other forms of right-wing populism and authoritarianism. So I’m mystified by statements such as the following, near the end of Reid Ross’s article:<br /><blockquote>“the claim [by Lyons]… that Trump’s campaign is interconnected to fascism, but that Trump, himself, can remain pure and clearly describable as ‘not fascist’ seems inconsistent. To detach the proximity between Trumpism and people like the Leader brothers [who assaulted a Latino homeless man in Boston in August] or [William] Celli [a Trump supporter who apparently set up a bomb-making enterprise in his home] so cleanly seems like an error. And that’s the main point: the radical right is not as simple as a cluster of autonomous ideologies perfectly honed and starkly differentiated.”</blockquote>This is a total distortion of my words. I didn’t make any of these “pure,” “clean,” or “starkly differentiated” dichotomies, but in fact argued squarely against them.<br /><br />In “Trumpism, Part 4,” Reid Ross emphasizes the “gray area” and “hybridization” between fascist and non-fascist forms of right-wing populism. In itself, this isn’t that different from my argument that Trump’s campaign displays a mix of fascist and non-fascist characteristics. Where we disagree, as I wrote in “Trump’s impact,” is that I think it’s a mistake to see such mixed political initiatives as having an inherent tendency to move toward full-fledged fascism. This was my one direct criticism of Reid Ross, but in a 3,800-word reply he never addresses it. He finds it strange that I disagreed with him while endorsing David Neiwert’s "similar" approach, but the key difference is that Neiwert made no such claims about inherent tendencies.<br /><br />Reid Ross only considers his gray areas as stages in the “creep” toward fascism. He offers no framework for addressing other potential outcomes, such as the possibility that Trump’s campaign might lead more white nationalists to work within the existing system. This narrow focus is strategically dangerous, because it limits our ability to understand and respond to multiple possible threats.<br /><br />I agree with Reid Ross that Trump’s campaign <i>might</i> develop into a more consistently fascist initiative. But it’s more likely that Trump will remain a champion of increasing repression and ethno-religious scapegoating within the existing political framework — which is plenty bad enough. Look at past history: before Trump, there were three major presidential candidates over the previous half century — George Wallace, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan — whose politics resembled fascism to significant degrees. All of them inspired and emboldened far rightists, but all of them ultimately remained loyal to the established order and helped make it worse. Given these precedents, the burden of proof is on Reid Ross to explain why he’s confident that Trump will develop differently.<br /><br />On a secondary level, I have to concede certain points to Reid Ross. He is right that fascist movements don’t necessarily involve an organized paramilitary force, and it was a mistake on my part to suggest that they do. Also, I overgeneralized when I wrote (paraphrasing Neiwert) that fascists are “absolutists who demand ideological purity.” As Reid Ross points out, in Italian Fascism’s early years Mussolini embraced ideological “inconsistencies and contradictions.” I would argue this was largely calculated bravado on Mussolini’s part as he worked to weld multiple factions into one movement, and that his ideology was already significantly more thought out and committed than Donald Trump’s. But it’s true that fascist movements don’t or can’t always demand ideological purity from their followers.<br /><br />On the issue of fascist populism, Reid Ross misunderstands my argument that “fascism seeks to actively and permanently mobilize large masses of people.” I didn’t mean that initiatives don’t qualify as fascist if they don’t succeed in building a mass movement. I meant fascists try to get people involved in active, ongoing activities (not just call them out as occasional spectators at campaign rallies) both to mobilize support and enforce control. This type of mobilization isn’t unique to fascism, of course. If you want an example, look at the Christian right, which has painstakingly built an elaborate organizational web, based at the level of church congregations and living room prayer circles. Again, I see no efforts along these lines from the Trump campaign.<br /><br />Replying to my argument that Trump isn’t fascist because he doesn’t advocate a right-wing revolution, Reid Ross asserts that Trump does indeed have “revolutionary leanings” because (a) some conservatives say or imply that he does, (b) he called for “a revolution” after Obama’s 2012 re-election, (c) Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center says that Trump is in some ways more extreme than many white nationalists, and (d) implementing Trump’s proposal to deport 11 million people would require a massive project of “totalitarian social engineering.”<br /><br />I guess it depends what we mean by revolution. To me, a fascist revolution goes far beyond events like the “Gingrich Revolution” of 1994 (in which Republicans gained control of Congress for the first time in decades) or even the “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s (which dramatically reduced the welfare state, transferred billions of dollars from lower- and middle-income people to the wealthy, and intensified U.S. attacks on leftist and popular forces worldwide). <a href="http://sdonline.org/47/two-ways-of-looking-at-fascism/" target="_blank">Fascism is revolutionary</a> in the sense that it<br /><blockquote>“implies an effort to bring about a fundamental, structural transformation of the political, cultural, economic, or social order. Fascism seeks, first of all, to overthrow established political elites and abolish established forms of political rule, whether liberal-pluralist or authoritarian. Second, fascists also attack “bourgeois” cultural patterns such as individualism and consumerism and aim to systematically reshape all cultural spheres — encompassing education, family life, religion, the media, arts, sports and leisure, as well as the culture of business and the workplace — to reflect one unified ideology. Third, some (not all) forms of fascism promote a socioeconomic revolution that transforms but does not abolish class society — as when German Nazism restructured the industrial heart of Europe with a system of exploitation based largely on plunder, slave labor, and genocidally working people to death.”</blockquote>Fascism’s revolutionary vision invokes an idealized image of the past, but it does so in the service of creating a new order, not just restoring old traditions. Yes, as Reid Ross tells us, Italian Fascists “harkened back” to the 19th-century Risorgimento (as well as the glory days of Ancient Rome), but they envisioned a forward-looking industrial society where capitalists and workers would work together for the good of the nation. Yes, Hitler “looked to” the military greatness of Germany’s Second Reich and Prussia’s Frederick the Great (as well as the paganism of ancient Germanic tribes), but he wanted a new, racially pure settler-colonial empire and had no interest in restoring the monarchy or deferring to the old Junker aristocracy.<br /><br />Similarly, it’s not true that white nationalist far rightists in the U.S. “have always upheld segregation and a racialized caste system as an ultimate ideal.” Actually most of them moved beyond old-style segregationism decades ago, toward newer visions, such as creating a white separatist enclave through secession, dividing the entire U.S. into apartheid-style racial homelands, or exterminating Jews and people of color entirely. Compared with these ideas, Trump’s proposals to make (white) America great again represent a much more limited challenge to the established order. His most extreme structural proposal, abolishing birthright citizenship, would intensify racial and national oppression, but unfortunately this change is all too compatible with liberal “democracy” as practiced <a href="http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/aug/23/se-cupp/se-cupp-only-about-30-other-countries-offer-birthr/" target="_blank">everywhere outside the Americas</a>.<br /><br />It is true, as Reid Ross argues, that deporting 11 million people would involve a big expansion of the state’s repressive apparatus. This would be disastrous in all kinds of ways, but it would not require any fundamental break with the existing institutional framework. <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/11/11/455613993/it-came-up-in-the-debate-here-are-3-things-to-know-about-operation-wetback" target="_blank">In the 1950s</a> (under moderate Republican Dwight Eisenhower) the federal government rounded up an estimated 1.1 million people through the odiously named “Operation Wetback” deportation program. <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/09/10/439114563/americas-forgotten-history-of-mexican-american-repatriation" target="_blank">In the 1930s</a> (under liberal Democrat Franklin Roosevelt), upwards of one million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported, when the U.S. population was about 40 percent of what it is today. Trump’s proposal is bigger than these precedents, but it’s not qualitatively different.<br /><br />Alexander Reid Ross accuses me of obscuring Donald Trump’s fascist particularities under the vague category of right-wing populism — of “missing the tree for the forest.” But a forest has many trees, and Trump’s candidacy points to different kinds of threats — some at odds with the established political order, others loyal to it. If we only see one threat we will be in trouble.<br /><br /><b>Related posts on Three Way Fight:</b><br />"<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/10/on-trump-fascism-and-stale-social.html" target="_blank">On Trump, fascism, and stale social science</a>" (25 October 2015)<br />"<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/12/trumps-impact-fascist-upsurge-is-just.html" target="_blank">Trump's impact: a fascist upsurge is just one of the dangers</a>" (22 December 2015)<b>&nbsp;</b> Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-89795549592987182392015-12-22T15:07:00.000-05:002016-01-09T19:56:30.449-05:00Trump's impact: a fascist upsurge is just one of the dangers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-22ivBAzwDuc/VnixmSfkUhI/AAAAAAAAAH8/KRKxue8wplI/s1600/Trump_Hat.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="301" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-22ivBAzwDuc/VnixmSfkUhI/AAAAAAAAAH8/KRKxue8wplI/s320/Trump_Hat.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>In some ways it doesn’t matter whether we call Donald Trump a fascist or “just” a right-wing populist. However we categorize him, his presidential campaign represents a serious danger. Whatever direction he takes in the future, whatever happens to his presidential fortunes, Trump is galvanizing organized white supremacists and fueling racist and Islamophobic bigotry and violence across the United States. Trump’s campaign has to be seen in <a href="https://theintercept.com/2015/12/08/donald-trumps-ban-muslims-proposal-is-wildly-dangerous-but-not-far-outside-the-u-s-mainstream/" target="_blank">context</a> — it grows out of long-term developments in the Republican Party and the U.S. political system as a whole — but it has become a destructive force in its own right.<br /><br />Two months ago, I <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/10/on-trump-fascism-and-stale-social.html" target="_blank">argued</a> that calling Donald Trump a fascist distorts our understanding of fascism and obscures his demagoguery’s roots in mainstream U.S. politics. Criticizing scholarly definitions of fascism that remain stuck in the 1940s, I also highlighted the divide between rightists who remain loyal to the U.S. political system and far rightists who want to overthrow it -- including many but not all white nationalists as well as Christian theocrats and others. That tension is pivotal for understanding Trump's relationship with fascism.<br /><br />However we categorize Trump, opposing his poison is not about defending democracy. The United States is not and never has been a democracy. It’s a mix of pluralistic openness and repression, an oppressive, hierarchical society where most political power is held by representatives of a tiny capitalist elite, but where there is real political space for some people and some ideas that would not be permitted in a wholly authoritarian system, including opportunities to organize, debate, participate in electoral politics, and criticize those in power. This space has been won through struggle and it’s important and worth defending, but it’s not democracy. One of the reasons the U.S. political system has been so durable and successful (at serving those in power) is that it's really good at shifting between openness and authoritarianism. Even anti-fascism itself can become a rationale for some of the most serious repression, as Japanese Americans experienced seventy years ago. Someone like Trump can push very far in the authoritarian direction without challenging the system on any sort of basic level.<br /><br />Given the danger Trump poses, some people have asked: does it really matter whether he fits somebody’s definition of fascist or not? Is this question useful, or is it just an abstract intellectual debate? I think it does matter, because it can help us understand the danger more clearly: not just his politics but also his relationship with — and capacity to mobilize — organized white nationalist far rightists. Saying it doesn’t matter whether Trump is a right-wing populist or a fascist is like saying it doesn’t matter whether Bernie Sanders is a social democrat or a communist. I think we should apply the same kind of intelligent analysis to the right as we do to the left, because it’s just as important for us to understand our enemies as it is to understand our (would-be) allies.<br /><br /><b>Radicals facing major candidates, left and right</b><br />Let’s stay with the Bernie Sanders analogy for a moment. In this presidential race, U.S. radicals — people who advocate a fundamental transformation of the socio-economic order — are faced with a major party candidate who breaks a serious political taboo by calling himself a socialist, says some of the things we think are important, and is generating <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/12/the-abcs-of-socialism/" target="_blank">new interest</a> in socialist politics. On the other hand, a lot of us have serious problems with some of his positions, he works within the existing system, and he has a long history that shows he’s really not a radical. What should we do? Some people who consider themselves radicals support him, others reject him as an apologist for U.S. capitalism and empire, and others are conflicted. People may say it’s pointless to get behind him because he couldn’t make meaningful change as president even if he wanted to, or they may say his campaign is raising important issues and could be a stepping stone to genuinely radical initiatives.<br /><br />If somebody said, “Sanders says a lot of the things communists say, so he must be a communist,” or “he may not be a full-blown communist now, but his kind of politics inherently leads to communism,” most leftists would not take this very seriously. Whether we support Sanders or not, we would recognize this as sloppy analysis, if not McCarthyite smear-mongering. (Predictably, some rightists have taken this very approach. The <i><a href="http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/bernie-sanders-is-a-communist-sympathizer/" target="_blank">Libertarian Republic</a></i> called Sanders a “communist sympathizer,” while <i><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259477/bernie-sanders-communist-and-ignoramus-matthew-vadum" target="_blank">FrontPage Mag</a></i>&nbsp;just called him a communist, as of course did <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/politics/donald-trump-has-big-plans-1303117537878070.html" target="_blank">Donald Trump</a>.)<br /><br />The Sanders analogy doesn’t prove anything one way or another about Donald Trump and fascism, but I hope it offers a useful perspective on the question and how we think about it. While Trump is not Sanders’s mirror image, some of the issues he poses for far rightists are similar. A lot of white nationalist far rightists — who believe that racial renewal demands a radical break with the established social and political order, and who draw on traditions of both homegrown white supremacy and European fascism — are very interested in Trump’s candidacy, because he’s defying the political establishment, saying a lot of the things they believe, and generating <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/12/10/donald_trump_is_breaking_the_white_supremacist_internet_stormfront_forced_to_upgrade_servers_to_deal_with_trump_traffic_surge/" target="_blank">new interest</a> in their politics. But they’re also clear that he’s not one of them, they disagree with some of what he says and some of what he’s done, and they’re skeptical about how much they can trust him. So they have to decide how they want to respond. Some of them reject his campaign while many others have welcomed it. They generally don’t think he’s going to bring the kind of far-reaching change they want, but many of them see him as raising important issues and as a possible bridge toward more radical initiatives.<br /><br />The specifics are worth a look. Michael Hill of the neo-Confederate League of the South <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-fearful-and-the-frustrated" target="_blank">commented</a>, “I love to see somebody like Donald Trump come along. Not that I believe anything that he says. But he is stirring up chaos in the G.O.P. and for us that is good.” David Duke <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/26/david-duke-donald-trump-is-too-zionist-for-me.html" target="_blank">praised</a> Trump’s call to deport all undocumented immigrants but cautioned that Trump is “1,000 percent dedicated to Israel, so how much is left over for America?” Brad Griffin, who blogs at <i>Occidental Dissent</i> under the name Hunter Wallace, <a href="http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2015/12/10/trump-white-nationalists-the-media/" target="_blank">complained</a> that unlike Pat Buchanan in 1992 and 1996, “Trump wants to keep the US Empire,” but added “there is no one else running who isn’t far worse… I’m kinda hoping he wins the primary and provokes a fatal split that topples the GOP.” And the Traditionalist Youth Network <a href="http://www.tradyouth.org/2015/10/the-trump-train-and-the-southern-strategy-the-only-hope-for-the-gop/" target="_blank">characterized</a> Trump’s candidacy as follows:<br /><blockquote>“While Donald Trump is neither a Traditionalist nor a White nationalist, he is a threat to the economic and social powers of the international Jew. For this reason alone as long as Trump stands strong on deportation and immigration enforcement we should support his candidacy insofar as we can use it to push more hardcore positions on immigration and Identity. Donald Trump is not the savior of Whites in America, he is however a booming salvo across the bow of the Left and Jewish power to tell them that White America is awakening, and we are tired of business as usual.<br /><br />“The march to victory will not be won by Donald Trump in 2016, but this could be the stepping stone we need to then radicalize millions of White working and middle class families to the call to truly begin a struggle for Faith, family and folk. For this reason alone I will campaign for Donald Trump because as the saying goes ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and that is doubly true if that person is viewed as an enemy by the International Jew.”</blockquote>As these quotes suggest, even those far rightists who welcome Donald Trump’s campaign have serious reservations about him. This ambivalence is politically important and we should try to understand it. To do that, it’s important to delineate fascism clearly from other forms of right-wing authoritarianism and racism — and also to see them as interconnected.<br /><br /><b>Trump campaign and fascism: distinct but interconnected</b><br />One of the few Trump-related articles I’ve seen that offers this kind of nuanced analysis is David Neiwert’s “<a href="http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2015/11/donald-trump-may-not-be-fascist-but-he.html" target="_blank">Donald Trump May Not Be a Fascist, But He is Leading Us Merrily Down That Path</a>.” There are points in Neiwert’s article that I disagree with — he counterposes fascism to democracy, for instance — but I think his basic approach here is sound. Rather than treat fascism as something radically separate and in a class by itself, Neiwert emphasizes that there’s a dynamic interrelationship between fascism and other forms of right-wing populism. And while “merrily” might be a bad choice of words, Neiwert isn’t making light of the danger at all. He argues that (1) Trump’s campaign embodies many of fascism’s core features — but not all of them, and (2) this actually makes Trump more dangerous than a full-blown fascist, because it masks his very real fascistic tendencies and enables him to be much more effective in “creating the conditions that could easily lead to a genuine and potentially irrevocable outbreak of fascism.”<br /><br />Acknowledging that there’s no agreed-upon definition of fascism, Neiwert offers a composite sketch from definitions by several leading fascism scholars, including Stanley Payne, Robert O. Paxton, and Roger Griffin, and uses this to summarize Trump’s fascistic and non-fascistic aspects. On the one hand, he argues, Trump shares fascism’s emphasis on “eliminationist rhetoric” (such as vowing to deport all 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.), “palingenetic ultranationalism” (an apocalyptic vision of national rebirth out of a serious crisis), hostility to both liberalism and establishment conservatism, charismatic leadership by a man of destiny, and contempt for weakness (such as mocking a <i>New York Times</i> reporter with a disability).<br /><br />On the other hand, Neiwert notes two key points that set Trump’s candidacy apart from fascism. First, although Trump has encouraged spontaneous violence against his critics and targets of his rhetoric, he’s made no moves to develop or ally with a political paramilitary force along the lines of the Italian Blackshirts or the Nazi Stormtroopers. Second, and more importantly, Trump “lacks any kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology.” While fascists are absolutists who demand ideological purity, “Trump’s only real ideology is the Worship of the Donald.” He is pushing a kind of gut-level hatred and paranoia, Neiwert argues, not because of his own belief system, but because it’s a way to win votes.<br /><br />I would extend this line of thought further, drawing particularly on Roger Griffin’s analysis of fascism. Point One: it’s true that Trump’s candidacy, like fascism, emphasizes a kind of populism, in that Trump has presented himself as an advocate of the common people against corrupt or sinister elites. But as Griffin argues, fascism isn’t populist only in a rhetorical sense. Rather, both as a movement and a regime, fascism seeks to actively and permanently <i>mobilize</i> large masses of people through a network of top-down organizations, constant propaganda, and elaborate public rituals such as the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg rallies. I see no indication that Trump has attempted anything like this. His campaign rallies are a short-term means to the end of winning the presidency — not the germ of any sort of lasting mass organization.<br /><br />Point Two: again following Griffin, fascism isn’t just an “extreme” form of right-wing politics — it’s a <i>revolutionary</i> form of right-wing politics, in that it aims to create a radically new type of society, state, culture, and human being. In the fascist “new order,” all individual and private interests would be subordinated to those of the nation — as dictated by the fascist leadership. Yes, both Italian Fascism and German Nazism came to power through the parliamentary process and both of them, especially Italian Fascism, made huge compromises with the old order. They left major institutions such as the military, the church, and (in Italy) the monarchy more or less intact. But even in Italy, fascism radically transformed the country’s cultural, educational, and political landscape to conform to Mussolini’s explicitly totalitarian vision, and this transformation got stronger, not weaker, as time went on. In Germany, the fascist revolution went much further, forcibly imposing a program of “racial purity” through sterilization and mass killing, and reshaping the class structure through the mass enslavement and importation of non-Aryan workers. Again, Trump is good at pandering to popular fears and hatreds and feeding his own ego, but that’s a far cry from promoting an actual vision of cultural or social change.<br /><br />Although people often use the term fascism interchangeably with dictatorship, most dictatorships aren’t fascist, because they’re all about preserving the old order rather than creating a new one, and they generally don’t involve any real populist mobilization. So even if we assume that Trump wants to outlaw elections, shred the Bill of Rights, and make himself president for life, that doesn’t make him a fascist. There are different ways to be dangerous, and the differences matter.<br /><br /><b>A "powerful trend" toward fascism?</b><br />What about the argument that while Trump may not be a fully fledged fascist yet, he’s heading in that direction? Alexander Reid Ross <a href="https://itsgoingdown.org/trumpism-chapter-3-propaganda-deal/" target="_blank">argues</a> this. He writes that we should “look at fascism as a ‘process’ rather than an ‘outcome,’ or as [fascism scholar Alexander A.] Kallis states, ‘it is more accurate to describe fascist ideology as a powerful trend, appealing to the most utopian and extreme nationalist vision and articulating suppressed energies which had previously no place in the conventional political agenda of either conservative or liberal nationalism.” More specifically, Reid Ross argues, “Trumpism as it appears today has the necessary components that make it a fascist ideology, <i>but it has not manifested full form in power</i>,” and “Trumpism can be seen as a manifestation of sufficient ‘fascistic’ positions to qualify it not just as ‘proto-fascist’ but as part of a process of ‘fascist creep,’ meaning a radicalization of conservative ideology that increasingly includes fascist membership while deploying fascist ideology, strategy, and tactics.”<br /><br />In an earlier Facebook discussion, I cautioned Reid Ross that we shouldn’t use a teleological approach to fascism. What I meant was, we shouldn’t treat certain political initiatives as having an inherent tendency to move toward fascism, as Reid Ross appears to be arguing above. Reid Ross conceded the point but thought I meant that we shouldn’t treat the fascist creep process as inevitable, which is not the same thing. Serves me right for using a pretentious word like teleological.<br /><br />I agree with Reid Ross that politics isn’t static — that movements, systems, and people can change — but they can change in lots of different ways, and we should be wary of interpreting these changes in terms of inherent tendencies. Depending on the circumstances and balance of political forces, non-fascists may be pulled toward fascism, but the opposite is also true. Both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s original governments included non-fascists, who were co-opted and eventually absorbed into fascist “projects” (while those who refused to be absorbed were destroyed). But during the same era, as Griffin has argued, fascists were co-opted into supporting conservative authoritarian regimes in several other countries, including Antonescu’s Romania, Vichy France, and Franco’s Spain. Since many people will argue that some or all of those governments were actually fascist, another example is western Europe and the U.S. during the Cold War, when most western fascists were co-opted into a broad anti-Soviet coalition in support of a non-fascist system for over four decades.<br /><br />Bringing all this back to Trump, there are at least two different ways to read the friendly reception his campaign has gotten from many white nationalist far rightists. One is that these fascists represent the logical endpoint of Trumpism in development, and while he draws the crowds they provide the ideas. This is at least consistent with Alexander Reid Ross’s position quoted above. Another interpretation, however, is that Trump’s campaign is co-opting far rightists into, if not renewed loyalty, at least suspending their disloyalty to the existing political order. JM Wong has argued on Facebook that Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric comes at a time when “the legitimacy of the state is increasingly challenged for white people” as “the wages of whiteness are dwindling.” In that context, Trump “is calling for an investment in the state, restoring it to some semblance of ‘america is great,’ for folks to continue to have faith in the state apparatus, as long as it is tweaked into more white supremacist overtones.” To the extent that far rightists support this call, they are buying into the system they claim to oppose. Conversely, the defeat of Trump’s candidacy could further intensify the white nationalist far right as an oppositional force.<br /><br /><b>Neglected factors: capitalists and theocrats</b><br />One issue that’s gotten very little attention in most of these discussions is fascism’s class politics. Although many leftists (and not a few liberals) have treated fascism as ultimately a tool of big business, I’ve <a href="http://sdonline.org/47/two-ways-of-looking-at-fascism/" target="_blank">argued</a> that fascism is an autonomous force whose relationship with the capitalist class is contradictory: “As a movement or a regime, fascism attacks the left and defends class exploitation but also pursues an agenda that clashes with capitalist interests in important ways.” In both Italy and Germany, capitalists helped fascists gain power, trading control over state policy for a crackdown against the working class. In the U.S. as it exists today, any drive to impose fascism would need support from at least a major faction of capital. The white nationalist far right currently enjoys little if any such support. If real estate billionaire Donald Trump were somehow to transform himself into an ideologically committed fascist movement builder, a major question would be how many other capitalists would back him.<br /><br />Another factor rarely considered in discussions of Trump and fascism is Trump's relationship with the Christian right, a movement that in the U.S. is vastly larger than organized white nationalism. Although a majority of Christian rightists want to make changes within the existing political system, such as outlawing abortion and homosexuality, a significant hard-line wing wants to impose a totalitarian theocracy based on their interpretation of biblical law. This current arguably represents a version of fascism that emphasizes religious obedience and heterosexual male dominance before racial purity or nationhood. Trump's campaign has gotten significant but not overwhelming <a href="http://religiondispatches.org/trumps-messianism-and-the-christian-right/" target="_blank">support</a> from rank-and-file Christian rightists, although a number of movement leaders have criticized his <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/24/evangelical-leader-calls-trumps-christian-backers-unchristian/" target="_blank">lack of Christian faith</a>, history of supporting <a href="http://www.cwfa.org/donald-trumps-pro-abortion-past-and-present/" target="_blank">abortion rights</a>, and even his <a href="http://www.christianpost.com/news/donald-trump-and-gop-evangelicals-dont-support-denigrating-immigrants-145472/" target="_blank">anti-immigrant politics</a>. So far I haven't been able to get a clear sense of what the hardliners think of him, but I suspect they would be enthusiastic only to the extent they are willing to subordinate their theocratic ideology to other political goals.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *</div><br />Donald Trump is not a fascist, but his presidential campaign is dynamically interconnected with fascism. Trump has emboldened fascists and is promoting many of the themes that they can and do exploit. A bigger immediate threat, I believe, is that he is helping to intensify the authoritarian and supremacist tendencies of the existing liberal-pluralist state, by feeding open bigotry and violence and making the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/12/11/they_are_as_dangerous_as_donald_trump_the_monstrous_foreign_policy_lie_that_goes_unreported_by_the_mainstream_media/" target="_blank">brutal policies</a> of other politicians — Republican and Democrat — seem more legitimate by comparison. Even Trump's loss in the primaries or the general election could drive far rightists into renewed militancy, and this in turn could offer centrist or liberal politicians another scapegoat to justify expanded repression across the board. If the choice Trump poses is less stark than democracy versus fascism, that’s hardly cause for celebration.<br /><br /><b>Related posts on Three Way Fight:</b><br />"<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/10/on-trump-fascism-and-stale-social.html" target="_blank">On Trump, fascism, and stale social science</a>" (25 October 2015)<br />"<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/01/fascist-revolution-doesnt-turn-back.html" target="_blank">Fascist revolution doesn't turn back the clock: a reply to Alexander Reid Ross on Trump</a>" (6 January 2015)<br /><br /><b>Photo credit:</b><br />"Make America Great Again" is Donald Trump's slogan in his 2016 presidential campaign, seen emblazoned on the official campaign hat. Photo by Spartan7W, via <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,_2016#/media/File:Trump_Hat.tif" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a> (<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode" target="_blank">CC BY-SA 4.0</a>)Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-69442062193903775782015-11-23T23:24:00.000-05:002015-11-25T17:42:11.692-05:00Jack Donovan on men: a masculine tribalism for the far right<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MWkGmzGkQls/VlPRox_N1CI/AAAAAAAAAHc/YstMuu9xZ68/s1600/Cincinnatus%2Bwith%2Bfasces.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MWkGmzGkQls/VlPRox_N1CI/AAAAAAAAAHc/YstMuu9xZ68/s320/Cincinnatus%2Bwith%2Bfasces.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Donovan: "Ur-fascism is the source of honor<br />culture and authentic patriarchal tradition."</td></tr></tbody></table>All far rightists promote male dominance, but the kinds of male dominance they promote differ enormously. The Christian right’s revolutionary wing — the folks who don’t just want to ban abortion, same-sex marriage, and teaching evolution, but replace the U.S. government with a full-blown theocracy — advocates “<a href="http://www.alternet.org/belief/my-life-daughter-christian-patriarchy-movement-how-i-was-taught-obey-men-and-birth-8-kids" target="_blank">biblical patriarchy</a>,” a doctrine that urges men to keep close control over everything their wives and children do, from the books they read to the time they go to bed. In this schema, for women to make decisions or speak for themselves isn’t just a bad idea, it’s a revolt against God.<br /><br />Jack Donovan’s version of male supremacy is radically different from that. He’s a former Satanist, not a Christian, and he doesn’t anchor his ideas in the Bible, but rather in evolutionary psychology — an approach that’s probably meaningless, if not satanic, to Adam and Eve creationists. He doesn’t focus on the family, but on championing a kind of male comradeship free of female constraints. This comradeship allows room for sexual relations between men, and Donovan is himself openly homosexual, which would of course be taboo in the Christian right. And while even the most hard-core biblical patriarchs aim to recruit women as well as men (claiming their path offers women security and respect, not to mention salvation through Jesus), Donovan doesn’t write for women at all. His audience, his community, his hope for the future, is entirely male.<br /><br />Over the past eight years, Jack Donovan has&nbsp;<a href="http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/" target="_blank">published</a>&nbsp;a stream of articles and several books about men and masculinity. His best-known work is the self-published <i>The Way of Men</i> (2012 - hereafter referred to as <i>Way</i> for short), which <a href="http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/07/jack-donovans-a-sky-without-eagles/" target="_blank">reportedly</a> sold an impressive ten thousand copies in its first two years. His ideas are important, in part, because they appeal to different sectors of the right, including members of the “manosphere,” white nationalists, right-wing anarchists, and (with a few modifications) even some Christian rightists.<br /><br /><b>Gang masculinity</b><br />“The Way of Men,” Donovan argues, “is the way of the gang.” “For most of their time on this planet, men have organized in small survival bands, set against a hostile environment, competing for women and resources with other bands of men” (<i>Way</i>, p. 3). These gangs, he claims, have provided the security that makes all human culture and civilization possible. They are also the social framework that men need to realize their true selves. Donovan’s gangs foster and depend on the “tactical virtues” of Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor, which together form his definition of masculinity. Gang life centers on fighting, hierarchy, and drawing the perimeter against outsiders (“separating <i>us</i> from <i>them</i>”). This, in turn, dovetails with many of Donovan’s core philosophical precepts — that human equality is an illusion, violence (specifically male violence) is universal, and moral accountability should be limited to the members of one’s own tribe.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iYANMIgXNUY/VlPSBv3QtVI/AAAAAAAAAHk/gRHGY_-VW3w/s1600/Wilhelm_Haverkamp_-_Les_lutteurs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iYANMIgXNUY/VlPSBv3QtVI/AAAAAAAAAHk/gRHGY_-VW3w/s320/Wilhelm_Haverkamp_-_Les_lutteurs.jpg" width="199" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In Donovan's ideal order, only male<br />warriors would have a political voice</td></tr></tbody></table>Donovan advocates “<a href="http://hooverhog.typepad.com/hognotes/2009/01/the-first-rule-of-androphilia-an-interview-with-jack-malebranche.html" target="_blank">androphilia</a>,” by which he means love or sex between masculine men. He doesn’t call himself gay, rejects gay culture as effeminate, and justifies homophobia as a defense of masculinity rooted in the male gang’s collective survival needs. This might sound like self-hatred, but Donovan isn’t hiding or apologizing for his own sexuality; he’s defining it in a way that’s radically at odds with prevailing LGBT politics. His version of homosexuality is a consummation of the priority that men in his ideal gang place on each other. As he has <a href="https://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-17870.html" target="_blank">commented</a>, “When you get right down to it, when it comes to sex, homos are just men without women getting in the way.”<br /><br />In Donovan’s worldview, patriarchy is the natural state of human affairs, rooted in that primeval survival scenario where women are a prize that male gangs fight over. And seen through his eyes,&nbsp; patriarchy doesn’t look so bad. Since Donovan is fundamentally uninterested in women’s experience, he repeats lots of “common sense” male ideas without question. <a href="http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2014/5/25/rape-culture-isnt-about-sex-its-about-power" target="_blank">For example</a>: “A rapist is something that no right-minded man wants to be,” so the whole idea of rape culture is a feminist lie, “a tool to silence criticism of women and exert control over men’s sexual behavior and conceptions of their own masculinity.” Similarly, “men have always had to demonstrate to the group that they could carry their own weight” (<i>Way</i>, p. 46), while it’s supposedly much more common and accepted for women to be supported by others. Never mind that women actually <a href="http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/Worldswomen/WW_full%20report_color.pdf" target="_blank">work longer hours</a> than men and do the bulk of unpaid domestic labor, enabling men in all regions of the world to do less work.<br /><br /><b>Against globalism and feminism</b><br />Donovan sees a basic tension between the wildness and violence of gang life and the restraint and orderliness that civilization requires: civilization benefits men through technological and cultural advances, but it also saps their primal masculinity — their strength, courage, mastery, and honor. For most of human history, he says, men have fashioned workable compromises between the two, but with societal changes over the past century that’s become less and less possible. Today, “globalist civilization requires the abandonment of the gang narrative, of <i>us</i> against <i>them</i>. It requires the abandonment of human scale identity groups for ‘one world tribe’” (<i>Way</i>, p. 139). Who is leading this attack on masculinity? “Feminists, elite bureaucrats, and wealthy men” — who “all have something to gain for themselves by pitching widespread male passivity. The way of the gang disrupts stable systems, threatens the business interests (and social status) of the wealthy, and creates danger and uncertainty for women” (<i>Way</i>, p. 138).<br /><br />With the help of globalist elites, feminists have supposedly dismantled patriarchy and put women in a dominant role. As Donovan argues in <a href="http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/no-mans-land/" target="_blank"><i>No Man's Land</i></a>: “For the first time in history, at least on this scale, women wield the axe of the state over men.” Women have “control over virtually all aspects of reproduction,” and “a mere whisper from a woman can place a man in shackles and force him to either confess or prove that he is innocent of even the pettiest charges.” Faced with the bumper sticker slogan, “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings,” Donovan retorts that this should be rewritten as “Feminism is the radical notion that men should do whatever women say, so that women can do whatever the hell they want.”<br /><br />Unlike Christian rightists, who argue that feminism misleads women into betraying their true interests, Donovan sees feminism as an expression of women’s basic nature, which is “to calm men down and enlist their help at home, raising children, and fixing up the grass hut” (<i>Way</i>, p. 137). Today, feminists’ supposed alliance with globalist elites reflects this: “Women are better suited to and better served by the globalism and consumerism of modern democracies that promote security, no-strings attached sex and shopping” (<i>Way</i>, p. 148). It’s not that women are evil, Donovan claims. “Women are humans who are slightly different from men, and given the opportunity they will serve their slightly different interests and follow their own slightly different way” (<i>Way</i>, p. 150). But that slight different way inevitably clashes with men’s interests and therefore needs to be firmly controlled, if not suppressed.<br /><br /><b>The Brotherhood</b><br />Donovan’s social and political ideal is a latter-day tribal order that he calls “The Brotherhood.” The Brotherhood is rooted in the primeval gang experience, where all men of the group affirm a sacred oath of loyalty to each other (spoken or unspoken) against the outside world. In this order, a man’s position would be based on “hierarchy through meritocracy,” not inherited wealth or status. The Brotherhood might be run as a democracy or it might have a king — Donovan isn’t particular as long as the leaders prove their worth and are accountable to the men of the group. All men would be expected to train and serve as warriors, and only warriors would have a political voice. Women would not be “permitted to rule or take part in the political life of The Brotherhood, though women have always and will always influence their husbands” (<i>A Sky Without Eagles</i>, hereafter <i>Sky</i>, p. 158).<br /><br />Women’s main roles in this system would be to birth and raise children, and to help preserve memories of the ancestors, because “young men should grow up knowing what their great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers did, and who they were, and what they believed” (<i>Sky</i>, p. 160). To some extent this sounds like standard conservative gender ideology, but there’s a difference. “The family is a means for the continuation of The Brotherhood, and gives a sacred role to women in The Brotherhood. The ideal woman is Queen Gorgo of Sparta,… boasting that only women of her tribe give birth to worthy men” (<i>Sky</i>, p. 158). This is a reversal of the idea that men become hunters and warriors to protect and provide for their families. As Jef Costello <a href="http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/07/jack-donovans-a-sky-without-eagles/" target="_blank">noted</a> on the white nationalist website <i>Counter-Currents</i>, Donovan is saying that women exist in order to bring men into the world, and the family exists because it makes idealized male gang life possible.<br /><br /><b>Relationship with Men’s Rights Activists and the Manosphere</b><br />Donovan shares some ideas with Men’s Rights Activists (“MRAs”) — notably that the legal system and the media unfairly discriminate against men — and has published several essays in the MRA-oriented journal <i>The Spearhead</i>. But he <a href="http://thematinggrounds.com/jack-donovan-interview/" target="_blank">criticizes</a> MRAs from the right, arguing that their stated goal of equity between men and women is a capitulation to feminism. Donovan is more favorably disposed toward the so-called <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2012/misogyny-sites" target="_blank">manosphere</a>, a loose online network of men who promote vicious hostility toward feminism and sexual predation toward women. In Donovan’s <a href="http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2012/09/long-live-the-manosphere/" target="_blank">words</a>, “The manosphere is an outer realm where male tribalism rules…. [It] is not about what women want, or about making sure men and women are equal.&nbsp;The manosphere is about men writing about who men are and what they want, without supervision.” In turn, influential manosphere figures such as Roosh V (Daryush Valizadeh) have <a href="http://www.rooshv.com/more-book-reviews-12" target="_blank">praised</a> Donovan’s work. Roosh V <a href="https://www.rooshvforum.com/thread-17870.html" target="_blank">commented</a> on <i>The Way of Men</i>, “Ironic that a gay man wrote one of the manliest books I've ever read.”<br /><br /><b>White nationalism and fascism</b><br />Donovan is a sort of white nationalist fellow traveler. He has written for white nationalist websites including <i>Counter-Currents</i> and <i>Radix</i> and spoken at white nationalist gatherings such as National Policy Institute conferences. As he writes in "<a href="http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2011/12/mighty-white/" target="_blank">Mighty White</a>," he is “sympathetic to many of their general aims,” such as encouraging racial separatism and defending European Americans against “the deeply entrenched anti-white bias of multiculturalist orthodoxies.” White nationalism dovetails with his belief that all humans are tribal creatures. But race is not his main focus or concern. “My work is about men. It’s about understanding masculinity and the plight of men in the modern world. It’s about what all men have in common.” His “Brotherhood” ideal is not culturally specific and he’s happy to see men of other cultures pursue similar aims. “For instance, I am not a Native American, but I have been in contact with a Native American activist who read <i>The Way of Men</i> and contacted me to tell me about his brotherhood [probably <a href="http://en.gravatar.com/ravenwarrior" target="_blank">Vince Rinehart</a> of <i><a href="http://attackthesystem.com/" target="_blank">Attack the System</a></i>]. I could never belong to that tribe, but I wish him great success in his efforts to promote virility among his tribesmen” (<i>Sky</i>, p. 166).<br /><br />Donovan has also embraced the term “<a href="http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2013/03/anarcho-fascism/" target="_blank">anarcho-fascism</a>,” which he explained in terms of the original fascist symbol, the <i>fasces</i>, a bundle of wooden rods that stands for strength and unity. Rejecting the common belief that fascism equals a totalitarian state or top-down bureaucratic rule, he identified the fasces with the “bottom-up idea” of “a unified male collective…. True tribal unity can’t be imposed from above. It’s an organic phenomenon. Profound unity comes from men bound together by a red ribbon of blood.” “…the modern, effeminate, bourgeois ‘First World’ states can no longer produce new honor cultures. New, pure warrior-gangs can only rise in anarchic opposition to the corrupt, feminist, anti-tribal, degraded institutions of the established order…. Ur-fascism is the source of honor culture and authentic patriarchal tradition.”<br /><br />Elsewhere, Donovan cautions that he isn’t “an anarchist or a fascist proper,” but simply wanted to make the point that “revitalizing tribal manliness will require a chaotic break from modernity” (<i>Sky</i>, p. 14). Still, there are strong resonances between his ideas and early fascism’s violent male camaraderie, which took the intense, trauma-laced bonds that World War I veterans had formed in the trenches and transferred them into street-fighting formations such as the Italian <i>squadristi</i> and German storm troopers. Donovan also echoes the 1909 <a href="http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html" target="_blank">Futurist Manifesto</a>, a document that prefigured Italian Fascism: “We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.” All this is part of what J. Sakai meant when he <a href="http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/the-shock-of-recognition/" target="_blank">wrote</a> that fascism “is a male movement, both in its composition and most importantly in its inner worldview. This is beyond discrimination or sexism, really. Fascism is nakedly a world of men. This is one of the sources of its cultural appeal.” I don’t completely agree, because fascism can also appeal to women on a mass scale, but the inner worldview Sakai was highlighting is an important aspect of fascism, and Donovan articulates that view as well as anybody.<br />&nbsp; <br /><b>Toward a failed state</b><br />In the preface to his latest book, <i>A Sky Without Eagles</i>, Donovan writes that a few years ago he advocated a “resurgence of masculine virtue” in America, but he came to realize “that contemporary American and Western ideas and institutions were actually causes of men’s decline and inseparable from it” (p. 12). He has written repeatedly that he doesn’t believe in the existing political system and that it offers no viable solutions. <a href="http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2012/05/vote-with-your-ass/" target="_blank">For example</a>: “The best thing you can do for your country — for the men around you, for the future — is to let the system tear itself apart. The way to increase personal sovereignty for men is to decrease the sovereignty of the state by withdrawing the consent of the governed…. If American men stop thinking of the government as ‘us’ and start thinking of it as ‘them’ — if we stop thinking of ourselves as Americans and start acting in our own interests, things could get really interesting.” Donovan <a href="http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2012/11/the-bright-side-of-illegal-immigration/" target="_blank">believes</a> that the U.S. is on the road to becoming “a failed state — a state where no one believes in the system, where the government is just another shakedown gang, where no one confuses the law with justice.” And he looks forward to that collapse: “In a failed state, we go back to Wild West rules, and America becomes a place for men again — a land full of promise and possibility that rewards daring and ingenuity, a place where men can restart the world.” He <a href="http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/becoming-the-new-barbarians" target="_blank">urges</a> far rightists to “build the kinds of resilient communities and networks of skilled people that can survive the collapse and preserve your identities after the Fall.”<br /><br />Donovan’s repudiation of the existing political system, more than anything else, separates him from anti-feminist conservatives and places him squarely in the far right. However, urging men to sit back and wait for the system to fail is an oddly passive strategy for someone so fixated on being “manly.” Maybe Donovan just hasn’t had time to develop more active plans for helping to bring down the globalist-feminist state. Or maybe he recognizes that if you’re serious about revolution, it’s not always best to advertise your intentions in public. As Three Way Fight has <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2012/11/liberal-counterinsurgency-versus.html" target="_blank">discussed</a> before, government counterinsurgency operations don’t just target the left, but also the right.<br /><br /><b>Male tribalism in context</b><br />As I argued in “<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2005/09/notes-on-women-and-right-w_112787003380492443.html" target="_blank">Notes on Women and Right-Wing Movements</a>,” far rightist positions on gender draw on four distinct ideological themes. One is patriarchal traditionalism, which promotes rigid gender roles and women’s subordination through the nuclear family. Another is demographic nationalism, which declares that women have a duty to the nation, race, or other collective to have lots of babies. A third theme is quasi-feminism, which advocates specific rights and an expanded political role for women while accepting men’s overall dominance. The fourth ideological theme is something that I called “male bonding through warfare” or the “cult of male comradeship”:<br /><blockquote><i>“This theme emphasizes warfare (hardship, risk of death, shared acts of violence and killing) as the basis for deep emotional and spiritual ties between men. It is often implicitly homoerotic and occasionally celebrates male homosexuality openly, and is frequently at odds with ‘bourgeois’ family life. In the cult of male comradeship, women may be targets of violent contempt or simply ignored as irrelevant and invisible.”</i></blockquote>When I wrote these words, I was thinking of European far rightists of the 1920s and 30s such as Ernst Jünger and the Nazi stormtroopers’ leader Ernst Röhm, as well as, more recently, Afghanistan’s Taliban. But while the Taliban combine their militaristic male comradeship with patriarchal traditionalism, Jack Donovan represents the ideology of male bonding through warfare in pure form.<br /><br />Donovan’s work is part of a trend on the far right toward increasingly harsh and explicit male supremacy doctrines. Quasi-feminism, which gained some influence among neonazi groups such as White Aryan Resistance in the 1980s and 1990s, has lost ground, while many Christian rightists and white nationalists have shifted toward starker forms of “traditional family” politics or moved into the manosphere. Biblical patriarchy is a prime example of this. Donovan’s male tribalism is another.<br /><br /><i>Anti-Fascist News</i> recently <a href="http://antifascistnews.net/2015/11/06/queer-fascism-why-white-nationalists-are-trying-to-drop-homophobia/" target="_blank">noted</a> a growing respect in white nationalist circles for Donovan’s vision of male warrior culture.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>“Though this is radically different than what many on the ‘alt right’ think [is] socially productive, they do note that society may need these cultural elements and that they are rightist in that they celebrate in-group/out-group distinctions, tribalism, and hierarchy.”&nbsp;</i></blockquote><i> AFN</i> frames this as part of a broader shift way from homophobia among many white nationalists:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>“We see a mixing of queer identity with open fascism with bands like Death in June, and all through the ‘manosphere’ there is a deep misogyny and white nationalism expressed by gay authors who have been invited into the fold. Though the stereotyped ‘gay culture’ is always derided by these groups, they play hard with the idea that queerness is biologically determined.”&nbsp;</i></blockquote>White nationalist intellectual forums such as Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute and Greg Johnson’s <i>Counter-Currents</i> have given Donovan a forum, and <i>Counter-Currents</i> has also published homosexual white nationalist James O’Meara. Even in Klan and Nazi skinhead circles, where Donovan’s homosexuality is often vilified, <i>AFN</i> notes that “more often than not…there is tacit approval of his inclusion and even a sort of backhanded support.”<br /><br />Donovan’s celebration of “small, nimble” gangs, failed states, and “anarcho-fascism” also meshes with the trend toward <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2014/08/anti-state-politics-on-far-right-audio.html" target="_blank">political decentralism</a> across much of the far right. This trend reflects influences as varied as Posse Comitatus, the European New Right, laissez-faire economics, and Calvinist theology. Donovan’s work has been <a href="http://attackthesystem.com/2012/06/01/the-way-of-men-an-anarchist-perspective/" target="_blank">embraced</a> by the anti-state far rightists of <i>Attack the System</i>. He himself cites ENR theorist Guillaume Faye as an influence on his vision of an ideal society, “The Brotherhood.”<br /><br /><b>Dispossessed men versus the new capitalist order</b><br />To put this in some kind of socio-economic context, it’s helpful to look at Bromma’s important essay, <i><a href="http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/exodus/" target="_blank">Exodus and Reconstruction: Working-Class Women at the Heart of Globalization</a></i>. As Bromma notes, globalization is dramatically eroding the old patriarchal system of controlling women through families:<br /><blockquote><i>“A unifying theme of the new capitalist order is that the labor of working-class women is too valuable to leave in the hands of the ‘man of the house.’ Women’s labor is now to be controlled more directly by capitalists and their professional agents, without all the clumsy and inflexible local mediation formerly assigned to husbands, fathers and brothers. Working-class women must be ‘free’ to move from country to country, from industry to industry, from household to household. They are needed in the industrial zones, needed in giant factory farms, needed as nurses and ‘entertainers.’ Their domestic work is increasingly moved out of their own families and merged into great global service industries.”</i></blockquote>As women have been drawn into the capitalist labor market, growing numbers of men “have been forced into the margins of the labor market, if not out of it altogether.”<br /><br />These changes, Bromma argues, have brought with them new forms of violence against women on a large scale: <br /><blockquote><i>“Where they are concentrated, capitalists and warlords manipulate and encourage dispossessed men to terrorize them, to push them off the streets and out of public life.<br /><br /> “And there is something more: the destruction of traditional family-based rural patriarchy brings with it a powerful reactionary male political backlash.<br /><br /> “Millions of men are losing ‘their’ women, and ‘their’ jobs, and it’s driving them crazy. Today, the main opposition to capitalist globalization comes not from the weakened anti-imperialist Left, or — yet — from working-class women, but rather from militant right-wing men. The anger of male dispossession fuels reactionary populist, fundamentalist and fascist trends in every part of the world.”</i></blockquote>These dispossessed right-wing men “are increasingly resorting to radical and violent measures to ‘defend’ and ‘reclaim’ their patriarchal birthright, or at least grab a piece of the action in a new male order.”<br /><br />Jack Donovan, who couples anti-feminism with a hatred of globalizing elites, offers a voice to some of these men. As Karl <a href="http://kersplebedeb.com/" target="_blank">Kersplebedeb</a> has noted,<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>“Donovan's gang has to be understood as also representing specific (patriarchal) class interests. Keeping in mind Bromma's observations in the piece </i>Exodus and Reconstruction<i>…we can see these gendered gangs as aspiring managers of women's labor, and a vision of a world system based on gangs like this would be a form of capitalism in which class and gender divisions were more explicitly and violently maintained in sync. (After all, someone has to feed the warriors, and here as elsewhere that will be the [female] proletariat.)”</i>&nbsp;(Email communication, 5 October 2012)</blockquote>It’s unclear how much staying power Donovan’s ideas have or whether they can win over men on a scale comparable to Christian right gender politics, but it’s safe to say that support for his ideas is growing. Donovan offers a philosophy of resurgent male power that’s just as sweeping and systematic as biblical patriarchy and that can appeal to men who are indifferent or hostile to evangelical Christianity, including pagans, atheists, and non-heterosexuals. This philosophy is congenial to white nationalism but not limited to it. It’s one more indication that the far right does not stand still.<br /><br /><b>Image credits:</b><br /><b><br /></b>1. Cincinnatus Statue, at Sawyer Point, Cincinnati, photo by Wally Gobetz, via&nbsp;<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/236322799" target="_blank">Flickr</a>&nbsp;<span style="font-size: 14px;">(</span><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/" style="font-size: 14px;" target="_blank"><span style="display: inline; font-size: 12px;">CC BY-NC-ND 2.0</span></a><span style="font-size: 14px;">)&nbsp;</span><br /><span style="font-size: 14px;">&nbsp;</span>2.&nbsp;<i>Les lutteurs</i>&nbsp;(the wrestlers) by Wilhelm Haverkamp [Public domain],&nbsp;<a href="https://www.blogger.com/%22https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWilhelm_Haverkamp_-_Les_lutteurs.jpg%22" target="_blank">via Wikimedia Commons</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: 14px;"></span>Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-37284750717339469542015-10-25T08:34:00.000-04:002016-01-09T19:53:48.818-05:00On Trump, Fascism, and Stale Social ScienceDonald Trump's rise as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination set off a flurry of articles labeling him a fascist. These pieces -- which have appeared on sites as varied as <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-fascist-354690" target="_blank"><i>Newsweek</i></a>, <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/09/04/trumph-will-taking-donald-trumps-fascism-seriously" target="_blank"><i>Common Dreams</i></a>, and <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/25/trump-the-fascist/" target="_blank"><i>CounterPunch</i></a> -- are misguided. Calling Trump a fascist promotes a distorted understanding of fascism and obscures the fact that Trump's demagogic hate-mongering is deeply rooted in mainstream U.S. politics.<br /><br />I was planning to blog about this until Chip Berlet, my friend and former co-author, made a lot of the points I wanted to, in a piece entitled "<a href="http://fair.org/home/corporate-press-fails-to-trump-bigotry/" target="_blank">Corporate Press Fails to Trump Bigotry</a>," for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Chip's article (I'll call it "Trump Bigotry") emphasizes the need for historical context and clear analysis, an approach that I strongly support. At the same time, I disagree with some of the specific ideas about the far right that the article presents. These ideas are drawn from recent scholarship about right-wing movements, but I think they make it harder for us to understand -- and effectively combat -- what many rightists are saying and doing today. This response to Chip's article is offered in the spirit of friendly, constructive criticism and moving the discussion forward.<br /><br />"Trump Bigotry" debunks claims that Donald Trump is a fascist or that he represents "a new force in American politics." The article rightly places him in right-wing populist traditions that go back to Andrew Jackson in the 1820s, traditions that blend scapegoating, repression, and mass violence with distorted anti-elitism. Chip's article also outlines some of the historical dynamics of the past few decades -- ranging from the erosion of traditional social privileges to increased infusions of cash -- that have contributed to the rightist upsurge we see today. As Chip argues, there are dangerous synergies between Trump-style nativism and the fascism of, say, accused Charleston shooter <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/06/dylann-roofs-white-nationalism.html" target="_blank">Dylann Roof</a>, but there are also vital differences between those rightists who work within the existing political system and those who seek to overthrow it. <br /><br />This delineation isn't just an intellectual exercise -- it's about recognizing qualitatively different opponents so we can respond to them intelligently. As I wrote in the 2007 article "<a href="http://newpol.org/content/bush-administration-fascist" target="_blank">Is the Bush administration fascist?</a>":<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>"militaristic repression -- even full-scale dictatorship [or racist populism, in Trump's case] -- doesn't necessarily equal fascism, and the distinction matters. Some forms of right-wing authoritarianism grow out of established political institutions while others reject those institutions; some are creatures of big business while others are independent of, or even hostile to, big business. Some just suppress liberatory movements while others use twisted versions of radical politics in a bid to 'take the game away from the left.' These are different kinds of threats. If we want to develop effective strategies for fighting them, we need a political vocabulary that recognizes their differences."</i></blockquote>Where I take issue with "Trump Bigotry" has to do with the specifics of what fascism and neo-fascism mean and how to delineate different branches of the right. Here Chip relies on recent work by social scientists, especially Cas Mudde, a choice that may largely reflect editorial constraints or the limits of writing a short article for a broad audience. I'll highlight and respond to three quotes from the article:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">1. <i>"For many scholars, right-wing populism is classified as part of the 'radical right,' while the term 'extreme right' is reserved for insurgent groups seeking to overthrow the constitutional order."</i></blockquote>This statement is accurate as far as it goes, but points to problems with the scholarship that should be addressed. Right-wing populism refers to political initiatives that seek to mobilize "the people" against both oppressed or marginalized social groups and against some image of elite power (Jewish bankers, globalist corporations, the secular humanist conspiracy, etc.). Many, if not most, extreme rightists in the United States, past and present, have embodied some kind of right-wing populism -- and this is in fact crucial for understanding their mobilizing potential. Witness the original Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction Era, which was a mass-based movement of southern Whites that used violence and terror in an effort to resubjugate Black people and overthrow "northern military despotism." Witness the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement" target="_blank">sovereign citizens movement</a> today, a 300,000-strong offshoot of the Patriot movement that claims the U.S. government is a fraud and imposter and urges people to declare their independence from it. There are lots of other examples. (As a secondary point, I take issue with the scholarly terminology: why is the "radical" right called radical if the "extreme" rightists are the ones advocating more radical change?)<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">2. <i>"In his</i> Ideology of the Extreme Right<i>, [Cas] Mudde wrote: 'The terms neo-Nazism and to a lesser extent neo-fascism are now used exclusively for parties and groups that explicitly state a desire to restore the Third Reich (in the case of neo-fascism the Italian Social Republic) or quote historical National Socialism (fascism) as their ideological influence.'"</i></blockquote>Mudde may be "the pre-eminent scholar in this area," as Chip suggests, but his delineations in the above quote are way too narrow, and don't account for the fact that far right politics have changed enormously over the past 70 years. Lots of neo-fascists don't invoke classical fascism explicitly, but hide their true beliefs under a more innocuous veneer. Liberty Lobby founder <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/willis-carto" target="_blank">Willis Carto</a>, for example, made a career of this for half a century. Others have developed new forms of fascist ideology that are very different from, and often reject, those of Hitler or Mussolini. The <a href="http://www.ethnopolitics.org/ethnopolitics/archive/volume_II/issue_3-4/spektorowski.pdf" target="_blank">European New Right</a> is a prime example. Whether or not Mudde acknowledges these developments (I haven't read him, so I can only comment on Chip’s quotes and paraphrases) there are other fascism scholars who do. <a href="http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roger_Griffin2/publications" target="_blank">Roger Griffin</a>, for example, has written about them a lot.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">3. <i>"In his book</i> Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe<i>, Mudde lists as common 'extreme right' features nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and the strong state, including a law-and-order approach."</i></blockquote>Like the Mudde quote above, this list doesn't adequately describe far right currents today. Sure, some far rightists still glorify a strong state, but one of the biggest developments in far right politics since the 1970s has been the rise of political decentralism -- ranging from the European New Right's vision of autonomous ethnically pure communities to <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/rightist/idennlns.html" target="_blank">Posse Comitatus</a>'s rejection of state authority above the county level to <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v22n3/libertarian.html" target="_blank">Christian Reconstructionists</a>' dream of a libertarian theocracy, in which God-fearing men rule through local and non-state institutions. Even the emphasis on nationalism, racism, and xenophobia overlooks the dramatic growth of far rightist currents -- such as Christian Reconstructionism -- that want to overthrow the established political system and replace it with a new order centered on religion (and patriarchy), rather than race or nation.<br /><br />None of this calls into question Chip's basic point that we need to apply terms like fascism clearly and thoughtfully. But it does highlight the need for more scholarship that addresses the full, living reality of right-wing politics. A typology of fascism and more broadly of the far right or extreme right, whatever we call it, needs analytic precision, but it also needs to be flexible enough to account for variations and changes in what rightists say and do.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; * </div><br />After almost a century of debate, there’s still no agreement among scholars, or among activists, about what fascism is or what it encompasses. My own thinking on this question has continued to evolve. In 2007, I <a href="http://newpol.org/content/bush-administration-fascist" target="_blank">offered</a> a descriptive profile of fascism based on four core features: radical break with the established order, totalitarian mass politics, twisted anti-elitism, and autonomy from business control. In 2008 I <a href="http://sdonline.org/47/two-ways-of-looking-at-fascism/" target="_blank">argued</a> for a synthesis of Roger Griffin’s ideology-based analysis of fascism and independent Marxist class-based approaches and offered a new draft definition: <i>Fascism is a revolutionary form of right-wing populism, inspired by a totalitarian vision of collective rebirth, that challenges capitalist political and cultural power while bolstering economic and social hierarchy.</i> <br /><br />More recently, I’ve concentrated more on delineating the far right -- which arguably includes both fascists and non-fascists -- from other currents. In the context of the United States today, I use the term "far right" to mean political forces that (a) regard human inequality as natural or inevitable and (b) reject the legitimacy of the established political system. That covers some (but not all) white nationalists, the theocratic branch of the Christian right, the hardline wing of the Patriot movement, and a few other currents. In other words, I see the far right as cutting across standard political categories, because I think the emergence of a truly oppositional right -- which doesn’t want to just take over the U.S. political system, but bring it down -- is ultimately more significant than ideological differences about race, religion, or other factors.<br /><br />But oppositional and system-loyal rightists aren't just in conflict. As Chip Berlet points out in "Trump Bigotry," they also fuel each other. For example, "the Trump candidacy and the shooting in Charleston are connected thematically by a mobilization to defend white nationalism while the racial and ethnic face of America changes hue." This is a complex, fluid situation, with different branches of the right both divided and interconnected, and we need a dynamic approach to understand it. Debates about terminology or definitions aside, I know that Chip and I agree about this.<br /><br /><b>Related posts on Three Way Fight:</b><br />"<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2015/12/trumps-impact-fascist-upsurge-is-just.html" target="_blank">Trump's impact: a fascist upsurge is just one of the dangers</a>" (22 December 2015).<br />"<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2016/01/fascist-revolution-doesnt-turn-back.html" target="_blank">Fascist revolution doesn't turn back the clock: a reply to Alexander Reid Ross on Trump</a>" (6 January 2016). Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-51146436795932125432015-08-28T20:17:00.001-04:002015-08-28T20:46:55.405-04:00Oath Keepers, Ferguson, and the Patriot movement’s conflicted race politics<br />When a group built around right-wing conspiracy theories sends heavily armed white men onto streets filled with Black Lives Matter protesters, it makes sense to be worried. But if these are white supremacist vigilantes, why are they proposing to arm black protesters and march alongside them?<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qY7qb0cP-MM/VeDvlmea1WI/AAAAAAAAAF8/gJ7s6LtNe2Y/s1600/Police_sharpshooter_at_Ferguson_protests.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qY7qb0cP-MM/VeDvlmea1WI/AAAAAAAAAF8/gJ7s6LtNe2Y/s320/Police_sharpshooter_at_Ferguson_protests.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;">Police sharpshooter at Ferguson protests - a repressive<br />response&nbsp;strongly criticized by Oath Keepers</td></tr></tbody></table><a href="http://oathkeepers.org/" target="_blank">Oath Keepers</a> has drawn a lot of discussion and criticism for deploying men with guns to Ferguson, Missouri, last fall and again this summer. As a part of the Patriot movement, Oath Keepers’ politics are predictably right wing on a host of issues — it glorifies private property, promotes homophobia and anti-immigrant scapegoating, and accuses Marxists of making common cause with radical Islamists to destroy western civilization. But Oath Keepers doesn’t fit the white supremacist profile that many leftists expect. Not only has the group disavowed racism (which in itself doesn’t mean much), more surprisingly it has also supported African Americans’ right to protest and even their right to practice armed self-defense. Very recently — apparently in the past few days — Oath Keepers has <a href="http://thefifthcolumnnews.com/2015/08/exclusive-oath-keepers-leave-organization-in-protest-after-leadership-reportedly-fails-to-support-armed-ferguson-march/" target="_blank">split</a> over this very issue, suggesting a larger conflict within the Patriot movement over whether to maintain white centrism or pursue a more inclusive strategy. While some leftists may see this as a hopeful sign, I believe it has the potential to make the movement more dangerous.<br /><br /><b>Backgound on the Patriot movement</b><br />Oath Keepers is a Patriot movement organization for current and former military, law enforcement, and emergency personnel. Like other Patriot groups, Oath Keepers believes there is a conspiracy by globalist elites to turn the United States into a dictatorship. Members of Oath Keepers declare they will refuse to follow orders to impose martial law, round up U.S. citizens, or take away their guns. In a speech earlier this year, Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/oath-keepers-head-government-planning-unleash-isis-attacks-race-war-economic-collapse-order-" target="_blank">warned</a> that the U.S. government is plotting to cause economic chaos, start a race war, unleash ISIS cells, and keep new immigrants from assimilating — all paving the way for a police state.<br /><br />The Patriot movement is a <a href="http://www.guilford.com/excerpts/berlet.pdf" target="_blank">political hybrid</a>, a meeting place for several different rightist currents. Its ideology is rooted in a mix of libertarianism, John Birch-style conspiracy theories, white nationalism, and Christian theocracy. Although all Patriot movement activists are hostile to the federal government to a degree, some have taken an essentially defensive position while others reject the federal government in principle, and a few have planned or carried out physical attacks against federal institutions or personnel. Many Patriot groups avoid explicit racism, yet ideas rooted in white supremacist or antisemitic ideology circulate freely, such as the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/what-sovereign-citizen" target="_blank">belief</a> that black people have far fewer rights than whites, because most of them did not become U.S. citizens until passage of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War. Anti-immigrant politics and the implicitly racist claim that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States (and therefore is ineligible to be president) have also become major movement themes in <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20090801/second-wave-return-militias" target="_blank">recent years</a>.<br /><br />The Patriot movement had its first big upsurge in the 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of activists (or more) — claiming core state functions for themselves — formed “citizen’s militias,” “common law courts,” and related groups. That movement wave didn’t last long, but Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008 sparked a second, even larger upturn. Since then, the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/year-hate-and-extremism-0" target="_blank">number</a> of Patriot groups rose from less than 150, peaked at 1,360 groups in 2012, then dropped to 874 in 2014. Oath Keepers, founded in 2009 and with a (disputed) claim of 30,000 members in 2015, has been on the leading edge of the movement’s resurgence. The movement got another boost in the spring of 2014, when hundreds of activists (including Oath Keepers) <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20140709/war-west-bundy-ranch-standoff-and-american-radical-right" target="_blank">gathered</a> at Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch to support his “right” to graze his cattle on federal lands without paying the grazing fees. Guns drawn, the heavily armed activists forced federal officers to back down.<br /><br /><b>Oath Keepers to Ferguson</b><br />Last December, after Ferguson, Missouri, exploded in fury over racist police violence and the legal system that protects it, Oath Keepers <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/08/heavily-armed-oath-keepers-return-to-ferguson.html" target="_blank">sent</a> armed volunteers to guard Ferguson businesses and homes against arsonists and looters. This month, as protesters commemorated the anniversary of Michael Brown’s police killing, several heavily armed Oath Keepers were back on the streets of Ferguson. They said they were protecting reporters with <i>Infowars.com</i>, Alex Jones’s right-wing conspiracist website, as well as businesses and residents. Both times, all of the Oath Keepers present were apparently white men.<br /><br />The Oath Keepers first appeared in Ferguson after <a href="https://news.vice.com/article/a-ku-klux-klan-group-claims-it-is-around-ferguson-and-fundraising-for-darren-wilson" target="_blank">reports</a> that Ku Klux Klansmen were converging on the Ferguson area to protect white-owned homes and businesses. One Klan group referred to Darren Wilson (whose killing of Michael Brown touched off Ferguson’s 2014 protests against deadly police racism) as “the cop who did his job against the negro criminal,” and the group’s leader declared, “we can’t have blacks robbing and murdering innocent whites.” Many other rightists, including Patriot groups, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014/11/25/radical-right-seethes-racism-over-ferguson" target="_blank">echoed</a> this view. When Oath Keepers showed up, a lot of people assumed it was following in the Klan’s footsteps. Many Ferguson activists <a href="http://gawker.com/whose-side-are-the-oath-keepers-in-ferguson-on-1723917237" target="_blank">pointed out</a>&nbsp;that the Oath Keepers had the privilege to carry heavy weapons openly while black people were being arrested just on the suspicion that they were armed. Whatever Oath Keepers’ intentions, as Andrew O’Hehir <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/08/11/the_oath_keepers_come_to_ferguson_race_power_and_the_not_so_secret_history_of_white_men_with_guns/" target="_blank">noted</a> in <i>Salon</i>, “the icon of the white man with a gun” is bound up in American mythology with the long history of Klan terror and racist lynchings.<br /><br />But Oath Keepers is not the Klan. In some ways it’s rooted in the same legacy, and old-style racist attitudes can be found in its ranks. But overall its response to the Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter movement has been very different. It’s worth looking at this response closely, as well as the organizational split it generated, if we want to understand what the Patriot movement is about and why it dwarfs the openly white supremacist right. The <i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/us/on-rooftops-of-ferguson-volunteers-with-guns.html?_r=0" target="_blank">New York Times</a></i>, <i><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/11/who-are-the-oath-keepers-and-why-has-the-armed-group-returned-to-ferguson/" target="_blank">Washington Post</a></i>, <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33867245" target="_blank">BBC News</a>, and <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/08/12/431978076/oath-keepers-say-theyre-defending-ferguson-others-say-theyre-not-helping" target="_blank">National Public Radio</a> haven’t done this — and neither have the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2014/12/03/oath-keepers-ordered-stop-providing-security-ferguson-businesses%C2%A0" target="_blank">Southern Poverty Law Center</a> or even <a href="http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/12/18/5-right-wing-media-narratives-attacking-the-black-lives-matter-movement/#sthash.PM0fujxV.dpbs" target="_blank">Political Research Associates</a> in their reports on right-wing responses to Ferguson. Here’s some of what they left out:<br /><ul><li>In August 2014, while the Klan was cheering Officer Wilson, Oath Keepers’ Missouri Chapter sent an “<a href="http://oathkeepers.org/oktester/open-letter-of-warning-to-governor-nixon-from-missouri-oath-keepers-2/" target="_blank">open letter of warning</a>” to Missouri Governor Nixon. The letter harshly condemned the Ferguson police for violating people’s right to protest, and offered detailed criticisms of its “spectacularly unsafe weapons discipline and methodology” such as pointing automatic weapons at unarmed protesters. “The militarized police response we saw in Ferguson did not work. All it did was violate the rights of peaceful protesters and media, alienate the community, and make our country look even more like a police state…”</li><li>The Oath Keepers’ open letter to Governor Nixon related the Ferguson crackdown to earlier examples of militarized, abusive police practices, including tactics used against Occupy Wall Street and the lockdown after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. Oath Keepers also connected police militarization with U.S. aggression abroad. “[M]uch like over-the top and indiscriminate threat displays and use of force in Iraq lost the hearts and minds of the locals, so too does it lose the battle for hearts and minds here at home – assisting in the agendas of those who wish to divide us along racial lines and create an ‘us vs. them’ mentality among both the people and the police.”</li><li>In November, Oath Keepers followed up with an <a href="http://oathkeepers.org/oktester/oath-keepers-open-letter-to-the-people-of-ferguson-missouri/" target="_blank">open letter to the people of Ferguson</a>, which began by declaring that “you have an absolute, God given, and constitutionally protected right to protest and speak your mind,” and that “the police have no right, no authority, and no power to violate those rights…” The letter reiterated Oath Keepers’ earlier criticisms of police repression in Ferguson, while also urging protesters to “‘police their own’ by looking out for hot-heads in the crowd who may resort to violence, looting, or property destruction,” so as not to distract from the reasons for the protest.</li><li>Addressing the local community, Oath Keepers specifically urged black military veterans to form armed patrols and neighborhood watches to keep Ferguson safe, and cited the Deacons for Defense and Justice (whose armed members defended 1960s civil rights marchers in the Deep South and helped to inspire the Black Panther Party) as a “proud and noble” example to follow, “except this time, you must defend against violence by anyone, whether outsiders or locals, of any race, against anyone, of any race.”</li><li>As an example of what they had in mind, Oath Keepers reposted an <a href="http://oathkeepers.org/oktester/black-residents-protect-white-owned-store-in-ferguson/" target="_blank">article</a> about a group of armed black men in Ferguson who were standing guard protecting a white-owned gas station and convenience store. “They said they felt they owed it to [the store owner], who has employed many of them over the years and treats them with respect.”</li><li>In August 2015, an Oath Keeper <a href="http://thefreethoughtproject.com/ferguson-oath-keeper-dispels-rumors-racism-condemns-cops-epic-rant/#KXRpSmLcaGvdtRFW.01" target="_blank">interviewed</a> on the streets of Ferguson offered an angry litany of recent police killings around the U.S., beginning with twelve-year-old Tamir Rice and other African Americans, then noting that police have also killed several whites, such as James Boyd, a homeless man in Albuquerque. In a separate interview, when St. Louis County Oath Keepers leader Sam Andrews was asked what he would like to say to Ferguson protesters, he <a href="http://truthinmedia.com/oath-keepers-ferguson-sam-andrews/" target="_blank">replied</a>, “The first thing I would say is ‘Black Lives Matter.’ The second thing I would say is that the Oath Keepers are there to protect your rights. We care about you, regardless of all the lies that the media and some other instigators have tried to propagate. Black lives matter, we care about you, we love you and we are there to protect you.”</li><li>Andrews also <a href="http://thefreethoughtproject.com/oath-keepers-arm-50-blacks-ferguson-ar-15s-hold-open-carry-march-downtown/" target="_blank">announced</a> plans to hold a march through downtown Ferguson in which Oath Keepers members would accompany fifty African Americans armed with long barrel rifles. “Every person we talked to [among black protesters] said if they carried [guns] they’d be shot by police. That’s the reason we’re going to hold this event and it will be a legal demonstration,” Andrews said. “I’m sick and tired of law enforcement who doesn’t think they have to abide by the law.”</li></ul><b>Color blindness and self-defense</b><br />These statements and actions by Oath Keepers reflected an ideology of color blindness, as <a href="http://oathkeepers.org/oktester/oath-keepers-open-letter-to-the-people-of-ferguson-missouri/" target="_blank">expressed</a> in their November 2014 letter to Ferguson residents:<br /><blockquote><i>“For us, this is not about race. This is about defending the Bill of Rights, which is a shield against government abuse that is meant to protect ALL Americans, of whatever color. Those of us who served in Marine or Army infantry learned to see only one color: green. Some of our brothers in our fire-teams and squads were dark green, while others were medium or light green, but they were all our brothers, and in combat, they all bled the same color – red – in defense of this nation and in defense of the Constitution…”</i></blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lk5HiK2jva4/VeD0Z98XzBI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/UVfIl5WC8y8/s1600/Stewart_Rhodes_speaking.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lk5HiK2jva4/VeD0Z98XzBI/AAAAAAAAAGQ/UVfIl5WC8y8/s320/Stewart_Rhodes_speaking.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers founder and leader</td></tr></tbody></table>Oath Keepers’ color blindness ideology set them miles apart from the Klan and other white nationalist groups. Their criticism of the Ferguson cops and support for the community’s right to protest contrasted with, for example, the Patriot Action Network (a Tea Party group), which <a href="http://patriotaction.net/profiles/blogs/ferguson-protesters-threaten-to-rape-and-kill-wives-of-police" target="_blank">claimed</a> that Ferguson protesters had threatened to rape the wives of police officers. And by invoking the Deacons for Defense and urging African Americans to arm themselves, Oath Keepers stomped on one of the traditional core principles of U.S. white supremacy, that black people must never practice — or be able to practice — self-defense.<br /><br />To be clear, color blindness is not an anti-racist ideology. It opposes overt racial discrimination but also masks (and thus helps to protect) the implicit but powerful racial oppression that remains central to U.S. society. Oath Keepers’ critique of police repression, for example, didn’t acknowledge the fact that cop violence systematically targets people of color. And some of its members echoed other racial messages that are common in the Patriot movement. The group’s New York state chapter <a href="http://oathkeepersny.org/2014/12/22/an-oath-keeper-speaks-out-all-lives-matter-including-the-lives-of-police-officers/" target="_blank">dismissed</a> the Black Lives Matter movement as a pawn of Communist, anti-American “race-baiters.” One Oath Keeper <a href="http://mic.com/articles/123697/two-images-show-the-double-standard-for-black-and-white-protesters-in-ferguson" target="_blank">interviewed</a> in Ferguson referred to President Obama as a “mulatto” and suggested he was a Muslim born in Kenya, which is right-wing code-speak for “a black man has no business being in the White House.” As a national organization, Oath Keepers has also <a href="http://oathkeepers.org/oktester/oath-keepers-joins-coalition-supporting-hundreds-of-protests-against-illegal-immigration-on-july-18-19-members-encouraged-to-participate-2/" target="_blank">called</a> for a crackdown against “illegal aliens,” who it claims are being ushered in by the Obama administration in a large-scale, planned “invasion” of the United States — although the group’s leader <a href="http://oathkeepers.org/oktester/obama-must-be-impeached-and-removed-to-stop-his-amnesty-of-illegals/" target="_blank">denies</a> that this position is “about race.”<br /><br />To further illustrate its approach to racial politics, Oath Keepers has <a href="http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/sodomites-go-hell-right-wing-july-4th-event-warns-hurricanes-create-sodomite-heaven" target="_blank">co-sponsored</a> two “Racial Reconciliation of the Races” events with the African American pastor James David Manning, who is virulently homophobic. At the July 2015 event, Manning led the crowd in chanting, “Sodomites, go to Hell!” and offered similar comments throughout his sermon.<br /><br />Although Oath Keepers was apparently the only Patriot group to show up on the scene, color-blind responses to Ferguson have also come from others within the movement. Chuck Baldwin — an anti-gay, anti-Muslim, pro-Confederate pastor who was 2008 presidential candidate of the Patriot movement-oriented Constitution Party — <a href="http://chuckbaldwinlive.com/Articles/tabid/109/ID/1220/Ferguson-A-Preview-Of-Americas-Burgeoning-Police-State.aspx" target="_blank">declared</a> that the August 2014 crackdown on Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson represented “A Preview of America’s Burgeoning Police State.” Baldwin conceded (to other rightists) that “race-baiters” were exploiting the conflict and suggested that the federal government was using “paid provocateurs” to inflame it, but chastised fellow pastors who keep silent about “the way our policemen are being turned into soldiers” and argued that the Republican Party has been “the most aggressive” in militarizing local police. Baldwin concluded, “This is not a Republican or Democrat issue; it is not a liberal or conservative issue; it is not a black or white issue; it is not a Christian or secular issue. It is a liberty or slavery issue!”<br /><br />On the issue of African American self-defense, in 2012 the <i>Lone Star Watchdog</i> (apparently now defunct) <a href="http://libertysflame.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=31294" target="_blank">published</a> an article under the headline “Hidden History of Militias Protecting Liberty in the 20th Century. Before they Were Called Oath Keepers,” which was reposted on a number of Patriot movement sites. The anonymous article celebrated the role of “Black Militia” groups such as the Deacons for Defense and Robert Williams’s Black Armed Guard in deterring racist violence against the civil rights movement. “Hidden History” argued that these groups were demonized and discredited by an FBI disinformation campaign and referred to the Klan as “an arm of COINTELPRO.”<br /><br /><b>Oath Keepers split over arming black people</b><br />In late August, the Oath Keepers national leadership reportedly withdrew support from the planned Ferguson march involving armed black residents, causing a <a href="http://thefifthcolumnnews.com/2015/08/exclusive-oath-keepers-leave-organization-in-protest-after-leadership-reportedly-fails-to-support-armed-ferguson-march/" target="_blank">split</a> in the organization. Sam Andrews and his “tactical team” withdrew from Oath Keepers, vowing to carry out the march on their own, and a group of Oath Keepers in Florida also quit. Andrews commented, “I can’t have my name associated with an organization that doesn’t believe black people can exercise their First and Second Amendment rights at the same time.”<br /><br />Both Andrews and “James Wise” (a former Oath Keeper in Florida who used an alias) pointed to the inconsistency of Oath Keepers’ willingness to confront police at the Bundy ranch but not in Ferguson. As Wise, who is Cuban American, put it:<br /><blockquote><i>“Unwilling to confront the cops. What the hell are we here for then? Who is going to violate the rights of the people? The Boy Scouts? If you plan on keeping your oath, you had better be willing to confront cops….You know race isn’t a huge issue here, but I have to believe that an organization that is OK with a bunch of white guys pointing guns at cops in Nevada over grazing rights shouldn’t turn into complete [multiple expletives deleted] [cowards] at the thought of blacks just holding guns in a march protesting people getting beaten and killed by cops. You know there’s something wrong there…”</i></blockquote>A related issue, Andrews said, is that the new Oath Keepers’ board is made up almost entirely of retired police. He, most of his tactical team members, and Wise are all former military special forces.<br /><br /><b>Patriot movement racial politics</b><br />Differences within the Patriot movement over racial politics are not new. A point that Chip Berlet and I <a href="http://www.publiceye.org/rightist/milnatbl.html" target="_blank">made</a> twenty years ago (about what we then called the militia movement) remains true today:<br /><blockquote><i>“While some militias clearly have emerged…from old race-hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nations, and while the grievances of the militia movement as a whole are rooted in white-supremacist and antisemitic conspiracy theories, many militia members do not appear to be consciously drawn to the militia movement on the strength of these issues…. To stereotype every armed militia member as a Nazi terrorist…lumps together persons with unconscious garden-variety prejudice and the demagogues and professional race-hate organizers.”</i></blockquote>Today, the split in Oath Keepers indicates that some Patriot activists are willing to pay more than lip service to the idea that constitutional rights should apply to everyone regardless of race.<br /><br />In addition, while the Patriot movement has been predominantly white and male, it has also included a few African Americans, such as J.J. Johnson, who <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2001/false-patriots" target="_blank">co-founded</a> the Ohio Unorganized Militia and described militias as “the civil rights movement of the 1990s.” Johnson <a href="http://www.zianet.com/web/blackman.htm" target="_blank">urged</a> black people to join the Patriot movement and argued, “If our ancestors would have been armed, they would not have been slaves!” Today, among the members <a href="http://oathkeepers.org/oktester/about/" target="_blank">profiled</a> on the Oath Keepers website are several people of color, reflecting the group’s claim that “Oath Keepers come in all colors, shapes, sizes, ages, and backgrounds…”<br /><br />The emphasis on gun rights, which Oath Keepers shares with the rest of the Patriot movement, helps us understand the movement’s often muddled racial politics. In the United States there’s an organic connection between racism and guns, because an armed white male populace was historically one of the cornerstones of the whole system of racial oppression. Frontier settlers needed guns for conquering Indian and Mexican lands, and white men in the South needed to be armed to keep control over enslaved black people, who were not allowed to have guns. Armed, decentralized white power has generally served ruling elites but has also fueled right-wing populist upsurges that clashed with elite interests — such as the original Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, which fought a guerrilla war against “northern military despotism.” And people of color and their allies, too, have invoked the right to bear arms — from anti-slavery activists to Chicano land rights defenders and the Black Panther Party. As a result, gun control has sometimes been used to enforce white rule, as when conservatives in the late 1960s advocated stricter gun laws because they were afraid of the Black Panthers.<br /><br />All of this history is in the mix when Patriot groups talk about the Second Amendment. And while the predominant thread of that history is about defending white privilege, other threads are sometimes visible.<br /><br /><b>Capitalist individualism</b><br />There’s room for disagreement about race, too, because the Patriot movement’s common denominator isn’t defending white privilege (or heterosexuality, or national borders) — it’s a vision of unregulated property rights, a capitalist individualism that’s militantly opposed to government “interference.” That’s why the Oath Keepers often talk about “protecting life, liberty, and property,” and why they initially went into Ferguson to guard businesses. Defending supposed property rights against federal government intrusion was what drove the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20140709/war-west-bundy-ranch-standoff-and-american-radical-right" target="_blank">Bundy ranch action</a> in 2014. For similar reasons, armed Oath Keepers and other Patriot activists have more recently protected disputed mining claims in <a href="http://oathkeepers.org/oktester/nationwide-oath-keeper-call-out-to-support-josephine-county-oregon-security-operation/" target="_blank">Oregon</a> and <a href="http://oathkeepers.org/oktester/operation-big-sky-protecting-rights-of-miners-in-montana/" target="_blank">Montana</a> against “unlawful” federal action. These Oath Keeper operations reflect a Patriot movement consensus. When over 100 Patriot movement delegates met in a 2009 “continental congress” outside Chicago, they <a href="http://www.nationallibertyalliance.org/sites/default/files/Articles%20of%20Freedom.pdf" target="_blank">declared</a> that “The United States is the only nation on earth specifically based on the premise of the right of individuals to own and control property," and that owning private property was “the root of our individual Freedom.”<br /><br />Capitalist individualism and racism are historically and culturally connected, but they’re not inseparable. In an era when overt racial bigotry is widely discredited, it shouldn’t be a surprise when even hardline right-wingers want to move beyond the white supremacist legacy. Andrew O’Hehir may well be right when he <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/08/11/the_oath_keepers_come_to_ferguson_race_power_and_the_not_so_secret_history_of_white_men_with_guns/" target="_blank">suggests</a> that the group’s Ferguson foray was a “kind of attempt at cross-racial outreach, however deluded and misguided in execution.”<br /><br />We should have no illusions that such outreach represents a move to the left. It’s highly unlikely — given that he’s a <a href="http://gawker.com/whose-side-are-the-oath-keepers-in-ferguson-on-1723917237" target="_blank">Donald Trump supporter</a> — that Sam Andrews is going to turn his splinter group into a progressive version of Oath Keepers. However, capitalist individualism (coupled with anti-globalist conspiracism, homophobia, and a strong emphasis on gun rights) could well provide the basis for collaboration between some Patriot groups and right-wing black nationalist organizations such as the <a href="http://www.blackagendareport.com/reactionaries_thugs_new_black_panthers" target="_blank">New Black Panther Party</a>. There are precedents, such as the Lyndon LaRouche network’s <a href="http://www.lyndonlarouche.org/larouche-farrakhan.htm" target="_blank">cordial dealings</a> with the Nation of Islam in the 1990s. New or not, it’s hard to see this kind of right-wing alliance-building as anything but ominous.<br /><br /><br /><b>Photo credits:</b><br /><br />Police sharpshooter - By Jamelle Bouie [<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode" target="_blank">CC Attribution 2.0</a>], via Wikimedia Commons<br /><br />Stewart Rhodes - By Gage Skidmore [<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode" target="_blank">CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0</a>], via Flickr Commons<br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-83346915200819336302015-07-03T06:23:00.004-04:002015-07-03T06:23:51.327-04:00The LaRouche network’s Russia connectionIn the United States, Lyndon LaRouche is widely dismissed as a wing-nut conspiracist — a guy who claims that Queen Elizabeth pushes drugs. But in Russia, LaRouchite ideology is taken seriously by high-ranking politicians and scholars, and is cross-pollinating with the ideas of Russian far rightists such as Aleksandr Dugin.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dqTVLJmrnZ4/VZWRUSDVU1I/AAAAAAAAAFQ/wZ27pJwYtzk/s1600/Larouche_PAC_Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dqTVLJmrnZ4/VZWRUSDVU1I/AAAAAAAAAFQ/wZ27pJwYtzk/s400/Larouche_PAC_Poster.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>The LaRouchites’ wing-nut reputation actually masks a lot of their more dangerous politics and history. LaRouche, a former Trotskyist, founded the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) in 1969 as a Marxist organization, but in the 1970s transformed it into a fascist political cult with a unique ideology centered on grandiose, arcane conspiracy theories. By the 1980s, LaRouche’s followers had built an extensive network of organizations on several continents, dedicated to propaganda, fundraising, intelligence gathering, and political dirty tricks. (For details, see Dennis King’s 1989 book, <i>Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism</i>, which is <a href="http://www.lyndonlarouche.org/newamericanfascism.htm" target="_blank">accessible online</a>.) For several years, the LaRouchites had a friendly relationship with the Reagan administration and its security services, but illegal fundraising eventually got them in trouble, and LaRouche himself went to prison for fraud and conspiracy from 1989 to 1994. However, his organization rebounded by shifting to more “leftist” positions, with an emphasis on opposing U.S. military interventionism and international finance capital.<br /><br />Having lost the U.S. government connections they enjoyed in the 1980s, the LaRouchites worked to expand their ties with political elites in other countries — above all, Russia. In recent years, the LaRouchites have increasingly emphasized the importance of Russia on the world stage, and have largely aligned themselves with President Vladimir Putin’s international policies, for example on the conflicts in Syria and <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2014/03/us-fascists-debate-conflict-in-ukraine.html" target="_blank">Ukraine</a>.<br /><br />A recent <a href="http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com/2015/06/sergey-glazyev-and-american-fascist-cult.html" target="_blank">article</a> by Anton Shekhovtsov traces some of the story behind this new alignment:<br /><blockquote><i>“With the demise of the Soviet Union,… LaRouche became genuinely interested in Russia and its economy, arguing against adoption of Western liberal economic models by Russia. In 1992, the Schiller Institute for Science and Culture was established in Moscow as a Russian branch of the LaRouchite international Schiller Institute, and started publishing Russian translations of LaRouche’s essays.”</i></blockquote>During the 1990s, LaRouche visited Russia and spoke at a number of academic meetings. His economic ideas sparked interest among some members of the elite who were unhappy with the laissez-faire policies that prevailed under then President Boris Yeltsin. <br /><blockquote><i>“LaRouche’s contacts in Russian academia and the Moscow-based Schiller Institute for Science and Culture actively promoted his ideas in Russia, and, since 1995, he was trying to exert direct influence on Russian policy-making in the economic sphere. Representatives of the Schiller Institute for Science and Culture presented LaRouche’s memorandum ‘Prospects for Russian Economic Revival’ at the State Duma, while later that year LaRouche himself appeared in the Russian parliament to present his report ‘The World Financial System and Problems of Economic Growth.’ His conspiracy-driven economic theories that denounced free trade and commended protectionism, as well as attacking the workings of the International Monetary Fund, stroke a chord with many a member of the Duma largely dominated by the anti-liberal and anti-democratic forces such as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia and other ultranationalists.”</i></blockquote>Shekhovtsov’s article centers on LaRouche’s relationship with Sergey Glazyev, who in the early 1990s was minister of external economic relations (but resigned because of a disagreement with Yeltsin) and then a member of the State Duma, or parliament. Since 2012, Glazyev has been a prominent adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin. <br /><blockquote><i>“During the 1990s, the LaRouchites praised Glazyev as ‘a leading economist of the opposition to Boris Yeltsin’s regime’ and published Glazyev’s interviews and articles in their weekly Executive Intelligence Review. In 1999, LaRouche published an English translation of Glazyev’s book <i>Genocide: Russia and the New World Order</i> in which the author exposed his theories about ‘the world oligarchy’ using ‘depopulation techniques developed by the fascists’ ‘to cleanse the economic space of Russia for international capital.’”<br /> * * *<br />“Glazyev’s promotion of LaRouche and his ideas in Russia resulted in the latter’s growth in popularity as an opinion-maker and commentator on political and economic issues in Russia – a status that LaRouche could not enjoy in his home country where he has remained a fringe political figure.”</i></blockquote>In some ways the LaRouchites’ current stance resembles that of Russian nationalists who combine support for Putin with romanticism about the Soviet Union. Although Shekhovtsov writes that “In the 1970-80s, the LaRouchites were highly critical of the Soviet Union and believed that it was controlled by the British oligarchs,” that’s not entirely true. Dennis King offers a <a href="http://www.lyndonlarouche.org/fascism19.htm" target="_blank">fuller account</a>:<br /><blockquote><i>“LaRouchian publications until the death of Leonid Brezhnev [in 1982] expressed an affection for hard-line Stalinism because of its no-nonsense attitude toward Zionists and other dissenters and its commitment to central economic planning. <i>New Solidarity</i>’s obituary on Brezhnev praised him as a ‘nation builder’ and avoided any mention of his invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Thereafter, as LaRouche became more heavily involved in supporting Star Wars and NATO, the NCLC line changed. Moscow became the ‘Third Rome,’ a center of unremitting Russian Orthodox evil. When Gorbachev took power, the LaRouchians said he was the Antichrist.”</i></blockquote>As King details, from 1974 to about 1983 members of the LaRouche network also repeatedly met and shared information with KGB officers and other Soviet officials. The LaRouchites claimed that they served as “the ‘open channel’ through which the KGB could pass ‘policy-relevant’ information to the CIA, and vice versa.”<br /><br />The LaRouchites don’t like to talk about this part of their own history nowadays, but they have nothing but praise for ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin. In 2011, for example, LaRouche <a href="http://archive.larouchepac.com/node/19582" target="_blank">applauded</a> the nomination of Putin (who was then serving as prime minister) to return to the office of president (which he had previously held in 2000-2008): “"This assertion of leadership sends a clear message of defiance against the British Empire's divide-and-conquer games, and represents a major step forward toward a new Pacific-centered recovery program for the entire world.”<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7bK_32JZ5F0/VZWS2mb9RQI/AAAAAAAAAFc/dDBm0bvacFg/s1600/Trans_siberian_railroad_large.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="223" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7bK_32JZ5F0/VZWS2mb9RQI/AAAAAAAAAFc/dDBm0bvacFg/s320/Trans_siberian_railroad_large.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Map of the Trans-Siberian Railway, an early example of&nbsp;the <br />kind&nbsp;of&nbsp;big infrastructure project the LaRouchites glorify.</td></tr></tbody></table>The LaRouchites like Putin not only because he has challenged the United States and European Union, but also because they see him as a kindred spirit on questions of national development. The LaRouchite program, for Russia and elsewhere, emphasizes a strong state role in society, classical culture and religion as the moral basis for politics, and big, high-tech infrastructure projects — notably a “Eurasian Land Bridge” transportation network — to drive economic recovery.<br /><br />The Eurasian Land Bridge idea highlights the question: how much does LaRouchite fascism have in common with the politics of Aleksandr Dugin, which centers on the vision of a <a href="http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/nationalism/shekhovtsov2.html" target="_blank">new Eurasian empire</a>? &nbsp;In some ways the two are very different. While the LaRouchites wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rational humanism, Duginists call for Russian ethno-cultural rebirth in much more <a href="http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/nationalism/shekhovtsov1.html" target="_blank">mystical terms</a>. LaRouchite publications rarely mention Dugin, but a 2012 <a href="http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2012/3921terra_america.html" target="_blank">article</a> in <i>Executive Intelligence Review</i> refers to his “gloomy Germanicism” with “a strong metaphysical component, but almost nothing by way of a coherent economic program.”<br /><br />Yet both LaRouche and Dugin offer a deeply authoritarian, culturally elitist vision of society, and a conspiracist critique of international elites, while claiming to reject racism and antisemitism. Hearing LaRouche demonize Britain as the center of the global oligarchic conspiracy, it’s not a big jump to Dugin’s <a href="http://openrevolt.info/2013/02/03/alexander-dugin-the-great-war-of-continents/" target="_blank">view of history</a> as a secret geopolitical contest between the good land power (Eurasists) and the evil sea power (Atlantists). And, above all, both LaRouche and Dugin see Russia as the key hope for humanity today.<br /><br />So it’s not a big surprise that Sergey Glazyev is on friendly terms with both the LaRouche network and Dugin. Glazyev <a href="http://www.4pt.su/en/content/aleksadr-dugin-russian-version-european-radical-right" target="_blank">participated</a> in the founding conference of Dugin’s Eurasia Party in 2002 before helping to found a separate far right party, Rodina (Motherland), the following year. Glazyev and Dugin are both members of the Izborsky Club, an influential far right think tank that <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879366513000353" target="_blank">proclaims</a> Peter the Great and Josef Stalin as the main heroes of Russian history. And one of Glazyev’s main jobs for Putin has been to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/03/17/world/europe/17reuters-ukraine-crisis-obama-penpix-factbox.html" target="_blank">negotiate</a> greater economic integration of former Soviet republics under the rubric of a Eurasian Union — a project dear to both Dugin and LaRouche.<br /><br />Glazyev isn’t the only link connecting LaRouche and Dugin. Another is <a href="http://www.vitrenko.org/" target="_blank">Nataliya Vitrenko</a>, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine. Vitrenko is a member of Supreme Council of Dugin’s International Eurasian Movement, which has branches in 22 countries. But she is also a close ally of the LaRouche network, who has for years <a href="http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2009/2009_20-29/2009_20-29/2009-23/pdf/54_3623.pdf" target="_blank">promoted</a> LaRouche’s ideas, addressed LaRouchite-sponsored meetings and conferences, and received favorable coverage in LaRouchite publications. In February 2014, for example, <i>Executive Intelligence Review</i> published a <a href="http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2014/4109vitrenko_statement_nazi_regime.html" target="_blank">statement</a> by Vitrenko under the headline “U.S.A. and EU, With Ukrainian Terrorists, Establish Nazi Regime.”<br /><br />These indirect ties between LaRouchites and Duginists in Russia are particularly striking given how politically isolated the LaRouchites are in the U.S. — even from other far rightists. This doesn’t mean the two movements are likely to join forces directly. Differences of ideology and political culture — not to mention their leaders’ egos — stand in the way of an actual alliance. But figures such as Glazyev and Vitrenko may serve as conduits — or “open channels” in the LaRouchites’ spy-novel terminology — that promote a sharing of ideas and information between the two. Glazyev and others in the political elite may also borrow ideological and programmatic elements from both movements to make something stronger. This is a level of influence most wing-nuts can only dream of.<br /><br /><b>Image credits:</b><br />LaRouchePAC poster collage - By Racconish (Own work) [<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0" target="_blank">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>], via Wikimedia Commons.<br />Trans-Siberian Railway map -&nbsp;By User:Stefan Kühn (Own work) [<a href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html" target="_blank">GFDL</a>, <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">CC-BY-SA-3.0</a> or <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0">CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0</a>], via Wikimedia Commons.<br /><br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-61531498979627417142015-06-21T15:26:00.001-04:002015-06-25T18:13:52.968-04:00Dylann Roof's white nationalism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q055ByrNDNM/VYx9CQSNnOI/AAAAAAAAAE8/fxnimNH1jmU/s1600/DylannRoof1488.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q055ByrNDNM/VYx9CQSNnOI/AAAAAAAAAE8/fxnimNH1jmU/s320/DylannRoof1488.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The racist <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/20/1394948/-Racist-manifesto-and-selfie-collection-confirms-what-we-knew-Dylann-Roof-a-racist-terrorist" target="_blank">manifesto</a> and photos on Dylann Storm Roof’s website spell out many of the beliefs that drove him to murder nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. Leading white nationalist websites have distanced themselves from Roof’s terrorist actions, but many of them have praised his ideas about race and U.S. society.<br /><br />Most of the manifesto (which I will assume was in fact written by Roof) is a rehash of standard white supremacist propaganda themes — African Americans are “stupid and violent”; slavery and segregation were benign; Jews stir up black people to cause trouble; and whites today are scared, disempowered, and under attack. The manifesto also rejects American patriotism as “an absolute joke”: “Many veterans believe we owe them something for ‘protecting our way of life’ or ‘protecting our freedom’. But im not sure what way of life they are talking about. How about we protect the White race and stop fighting for the jews.”<br /><br />Roof called his website (which is no longer active but is archived <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150620134455/http://lastrhodesian.com/" target="_blank">here</a>) <i>LastRhodesian.com</i>, expressing solidarity with the former white settler colonial Republic of Rhodesia. The website included many <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/20/dylann-roof-visited-slave-plantations-confederate-landmarks-before-massacre.html" target="_blank">photos</a> of Roof posing with a Confederate battle flag, a gun, a burning American flag, or the neonazi code-phrase “1488” written in the sand. (“88” stands for “HH” or “Heil Hitler,” while “14” refers to the “Fourteen Words” slogan coined by neonazi David Lane: “<i>We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children</i>.”)<br /><br />Despite his use of neonazi symbolism and rejection of U.S. patriotism, Roof differs with standard white nationalist positions on several points of racial ideology. For example, he declares that “the majority of American and European jews are White. In my opinion the issues with jews is not their blood, but their identity. I think that if we could somehow destroy the jewish identity, then they wouldnt cause much of a problem.” The manifesto also expresses ambivalence about Latinos (“there are good hispanics and bad hispanics”) and even a wish for a racist alliance between white nationalists and East Asians. Roof also rejected the idea of a racially pure white enclave in the Pacific Northwest, a vision promoted by the old Aryan Nations organization and others: “To me the whole idea just parralells the concept of White people running to the suburbs. The whole idea is pathetic and just another way to run from the problem without facing it.”<br /><br />Other white nationalist websites have had mixed responses to Roof and his manifesto. Several commenters on <i>Stormfront</i> questioned the manifesto’s authenticity, or dismissed the Emanuel Church massacre itself as a “false flag” operation designed to discredit the white nationalist cause. On the <i>Vanguard News Network</i>, Tim McGreen <a href="http://www.vanguardnewsnetwork.com/2015/06/dylann-roofs-manifesto/#comments" target="_blank">wrote</a>, “I rather doubt [Roof] is capable of writing anything. Unless it can be proven otherwise I am convinced that ZOG invented this whole story, complete with fake pictures of the ‘perpetrator’ and a fake ‘manifesto’.” (“ZOG” stands for “Zionist Occupation Government” and is standard neonazi-speak for the U.S. government.) A more positive <a href="https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1106849-5/" target="_blank">spin</a> came from “Macromedia” on <i>Stormfront</i>: “This young man gave a sophisticated analysis of black behavior and the media's role in it…. Though I can't condone or support the shooting of unarmed citizens in religious service, this act forces America to read his manifesto…. Perhaps this will reverse the tide by awakening many more, just like Dylann himself was awakened in the wake of Trayvon.”<br /><br />On <i>Counter-Currents</i>, which offers a more intellectual brand of white nationalism, Editor-in-Chief Greg Johnson <a href="http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/06/dylann-roofs-manifesto/#more-55958" target="_blank">argued</a>, “It seems unlikely that this manifesto is fake, since Roof is alive and could expose it if it were.” Johnson added, “If I had a son, he would look like Dylann Roof.” The general sentiment on <i>Counter-Currents</i> was respect for Roof’s views and disappointment about the massacre — not because of the people killed or injured but because it makes white nationalism look bad. As one commenter (“Christopher”) put it: “A cogent and insightful piece. [Roof] quite plainly is a white nationalist, and a moderately intelligent one at that. This makes his choice of target even more puzzling; based on this text, he should be smart enough to know that attacking a church would do significant damage to the cause and would do nothing to halt the kinds of things he’s upset about.”<br /><br />Marcus Cicero* offered a detailed critique of Roof’s manifesto on his new website <i>Majority Rebellion</i> (tagline: “help save Western civilization”). In a guest post on Brad Griffin's <i>Occidental Dissent</i> blog, Cicero <a href="http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2015/06/20/alleged-manifesto-of-charleston-shooter-dylann-roof-released/" target="_blank">referred</a>&nbsp;to Roof as a “drug-addled maniac [who] is obviously mentally-deranged, and has only caused an exponential increase in the level of hatred geared toward pro-White and pro-South causes and individuals.” Still, Cicero <a href="http://www.majorityrebellion.com/2015/06/21/the-dylann-storm-roof-saga-the-plot-twists-turns-and-thickens/" target="_blank">argued</a> that the manifesto “does not come across as all that controversial or fanatical,” and that much of Roof’s discussion of U.S. society “show[s] at least a respectable understanding of the workings of both Blacks and the Jew, [and] contains truths that nearly every White Nationalist would be able to agree with.” He also agreed with Roof in rejecting the Northwest Enclave idea: “although I personally dislike having to agree with this lone-wolf fool, who has likely hurt our Cause due to his idiocy, facts are facts.” On the other hand, in Cicero’s view, Roof does not sufficiently understand the inherent genetic inferiority of Hispanics, East Asians, and Jews.<br /><br /><i>[*Note: The original version of this post mistakenly attributed Cicero’s statements about Roof to Brad Griffin, who runs the blog</i> Occidental Dissent <i>under the pseudonym Hunter Wallace. Griffin pointed out this error in a comment below.]</i><br /><br />Dylann Roof’s manifesto helps us understand the Emanuel Church massacre as an expression of white nationalist politics. This is useful, but it’s not enough. Because in a larger sense, the massacre is also an expression of U.S. society as an overall system. As <i>AlterNet’s</i> Kali Holloway <a href="http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/dylann-roof-america" target="_blank">wrote</a>&nbsp;in “Dylann Roof is America,” “We are a country where mass shootings are weekly news, where gun violence is a fact of daily life, where there is a legacy of terror against black people and communities, where white racists have long targeted black churches, where African-American life is so devalued it can be taken with impunity.” Roof’s reported comment to the Emanuel Church congregants before he shot them — “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go” — expresses widespread, deeply rooted white myths about black people, as Jamelle Bouie has <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/the_deadly_history_of_they_re_raping_our_women_racists_have_long_defended.html" target="_blank">argued</a>, among others. And as the website <i>Africa is a Country</i> <a href="http://africasacountry.com/the-connection-between-terrorist-dylann-roof-and-white-supremacist-regimes-in-africa-runs-through-the-heart-of-us-conservatism/" target="_blank">reminded</a>&nbsp;us, Roof’s glorification of white-dominated Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa puts him in the same camp as “mainstream” politicians such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Jesse Helms, Pat Robertson, and Dick Cheney.<br /><br /><b>Photo</b>: From <i>LastRhodesian.com</i>, republished on <i><a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/20/1394948/-Racist-manifesto-and-selfie-collection-confirms-what-we-knew-Dylann-Roof-a-racist-terrorist" target="_blank">Daily Kos</a></i>.Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-45686961143942771742015-06-10T21:03:00.001-04:002015-06-10T21:03:24.486-04:00July 25 International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners!!<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8FWtKg0VFY8/VXjd28K5_-I/AAAAAAAAAEc/q6mJnKFCnXQ/s1600/free-all-antifa-prisoners1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="205" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8FWtKg0VFY8/VXjd28K5_-I/AAAAAAAAAEc/q6mJnKFCnXQ/s400/free-all-antifa-prisoners1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>From <a href="https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">NYC Antifa</a>:<br /><br /><i>"The <b>July 25 International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners</b> originated in 2014 as a Day of Solidarity with Jock Palfreeman, an Australian who is imprisoned in Bulgaria for defending two Romani men from an attack by fascist football hooligans. Groups around the world took action: holding demonstrations, benefits supporting the Bulgarian Prisoners Association, writing to Jock, and talking about the plight of the Romani and Sinti people in general.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>"In 2015 we would like to expand this day of solidarity to all antifascist prisoners around the world. We encourage groups to take the day to plan an event of their choice—whether it is a letter writing, demonstration, benefit, or other action—and to focus on the prisoners and related issues that are of most importance to them locally."</i><br /><br /><a href="https://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/july-25-intl-day-of-soli-with-antifa-prisoners/" target="_blank">Read more</a>Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-65244946598383302902015-05-31T10:01:00.001-04:002015-05-31T10:01:21.493-04:00A few websites that monitor the Right<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vnEwzf98Bvw/VWsRzGAFRJI/AAAAAAAAAEM/BXaCJe7aqYM/s1600/Mi_Vocacion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="210" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vnEwzf98Bvw/VWsRzGAFRJI/AAAAAAAAAEM/BXaCJe7aqYM/s320/Mi_Vocacion.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>You probably know about the Southern Poverty Law Center, but do you know about South Asia Citizens Web or the Association for Women’s Rights in Development? There are lots of groups out there that monitor right-wing political forces and the struggles against them. In this post I highlight eight of them. I’ve picked sites that may be lesser known, and that target various branches of the right, in various parts of the world, from various political perspectives. I don’t necessarily agree with their politics, but I’m grateful for the reporting and analysis that they provide.<br /><br /><b><a href="http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Anton Shekhovtsov’s blog</a></b>&nbsp;is written by Ukrainian political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov, whose research interests center on far right politics in Europe, particularly central and eastern Europe, as well as red-brown alliance-building. A number of related resources are available via Shekhovtsov’s <a href="http://www.shekhovtsov.org/" target="_blank">website</a>. Here are some examples of recent articles on his blog: <br /><ul><li>“<a href="http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.ca/2015/01/whither-ukrainian-far-right.html" target="_blank">Whither the Ukrainian Far Right?</a>”&nbsp;</li><li>“<a href="http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-national-bolshevik-alliance-is.html" target="_blank">The ‘National-Bolshevik’ alliance is again at work in the European Parliament</a>”&nbsp;</li><li>“<a href="http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com/2015/01/aleksandr-dugin-and-syriza-connection.html" target="_blank">Aleksandr Dugin and the SYRIZA connection</a>”&nbsp;</li><li>“<a href="http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com/2014/11/russian-extreme-right-white-rex.html" target="_blank">Russian extreme right White Rex organisation engaged in training of British neo-Nazi thugs</a>”</li></ul><b><a href="http://www.awid.org/" target="_blank">Association for Women’s Rights in Development</a></b> (AWID) is a global feminist member organization with offices in Capetown, Mexico City, and Toronto. One of their areas of focus is their <a href="http://www.awid.org/priority-areas/religious-fundamentalisms" target="_blank">Challenging Religious Fundamantalisms</a> program, which shares information about fundamentalist movements and supports efforts by women’s rights activists to combat them. Some recent articles in AWID’s <i>Facing Fundamentalisms Newsletter</i> have included the following: <br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/men-charge-rethinking-authority-muslim-legal-tradition" target="_blank">Review of <i>Men In Charge? Rethinking Authority In Muslim Legal Tradition</i></a></li><li>“<a href="http://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/womens-rights-activists-resist-myanmars-proposed-law-protection-race-and-religion" target="_blank">Women's Rights Activists Resist Myanmar's Proposed 'Law on Protection of Race and Religion</a>’”</li><li>“<a href="http://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/armenias-far-right-pitting-family-against-fundamental-rights" target="_blank">Armenia’s Far-Right Pitting ‘The Family’ Against Fundamental Rights</a>”</li><li>“<span id="goog_1472083745"></span><a href="http://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-activists-challenge-regressions-croatia" target="_blank">Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Activists Challenge Regressions In Croatia</a><span id="goog_1472083746"></span>”&nbsp;</li></ul><b><a href="https://avtonom.org/en" target="_blank">Autonomous Action</a></b> (<i>Avtonomnoe Deystvie</i>, or AD) is a libertarian communist federation with branches in Russia, Ukraine, and Belorus. Its <a href="http://wiki.avtonom.org/en/index.php/Manifesto_of_Autonomous_Action" target="_blank">Manifesto</a> includes an emphasis on anti-fascism and anti-nationalism, among other themes. AD reports on far right activities, anti-fascist activities, and state repression against anti-fascists. <br /><ul><li>“<a href="https://avtonom.org/en/author_columns/racism-russian-antifa-and-hardcore-subculture" target="_blank">On racism in the Russian antifa and hardcore subculture</a>”</li><li>“<a href="https://avtonom.org/en/author_columns/end-antifa" target="_blank">The End of Antifa?</a>” (about anti-fascists fighting on both sides of the conflict in Ukraine)</li><li>“<a href="https://avtonom.org/en/freenews/russia-parents-arrested-anti-fascist-alen-volikov-threatened-violence-police" target="_blank">Russia: Parents of arrested anti-fascist Alen Volikov threatened with violence by police</a>”</li></ul><b><a href="http://newcomm.org/" target="_blank">Center for New Community</a></b>&nbsp;is a Chicago-based liberal social justice organization that places special emphasis on countering anti-immigrant nativism and related forms of bigotry. Its Resources page (http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/resources/) features a series of brief articles and charts on topics such as eugenics and Islamophobia. Here are some recent articles from its <a href="http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/category/nativism-watch/" target="_blank">Nativism Watch</a> section:<br /><ul><li>“<a href="http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2015/04/30/geert-wilders-in-washington-the-less-islam-the-better/" target="_blank">Geert Wilders in Washington: ‘The less Islam, the better</a>’”</li><li>“<a href="http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2015/04/14/nativist-former-rep-tom-tancredo-to-speak-at-oath-keepers-rally/" target="_blank">Nativist former Rep. Tom Tancredo to speak at Oath Keepers rally</a>”</li><li>“<a href="http://imagine2050.newcomm.org/2015/03/19/immigrant-workers-are-like-animals-prone-to-gun-violence-says-fair-state-group/" target="_blank">FAIR state group: Immigrant workers prone to gun violence, resemble sheltered animals</a>”&nbsp;</li></ul><b><a href="http://www.sacw.net/" target="_blank">South Asia Citizens Web</a></b> (SACW) is a left-leaning secularist website that provides reports and commentary on a wide variety of topics related to Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and South Asians in the diaspora. SACW devotes a lot of attention to Hindu nationalism, the Islamic right, and other forms of "communalism" (ethnoreligious bigotry and violence). Here are some of their recent publications: <br /><ul><li>“<a href="http://www.sacw.net/article9057.html" target="_blank">Hindu Nationalism in the United States: A Report on Nonprofit Groups</a>”</li><li>“<a href="http://www.sacw.net/article11211.html" target="_blank">Daily Life of Segregation and Ghettoisation in Modi’s Gujarat</a>”</li><li>“<a href="http://www.sacw.net/article10533.html" target="_blank">Video report: In Pakistani Schools, Jihad Is Back</a>”&nbsp;</li><li>“<a href="http://www.sacw.net/article10736.html" target="_blank">Bangladesh: editorials and commentary following the killing of the blogger Avijit Roy</a>”</li></ul><b><a href="https://tahriricn.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Tahrir-International Collective Network</a></b> (Tahrir-ICN) is a an online network whose tagline is “bringing together anarchist perspectives from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.” Tahrir-ICN’s <a href="https://tahriricn.wordpress.com/about/" target="_blank">Manifesto</a> notes that radical movements&nbsp; in all of these regions face “similar challenges: the implementation of a liberal economy and the threat from the extreme right, whether Christian or Islamic.” Recent posts have addressed events in Syria, Palestine, Morocco, Kurdistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Egypt, Germany, France, and Israel. <br /><ul><li>“<a href="https://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/syrias-multi-party-conflict-and-multi-way-war/" target="_blank">Syria’s multi-party conflict and multi-way&nbsp;war</a>”</li><li>“<a href="https://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/fathers-of-isis/" target="_blank">Fathers of ISIS</a>”</li><li>“<a href="https://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/france-weekend-of-anti-fascist-resistance-in-calais-5-7-september-and-defence-of-migrant-squats/" target="_blank">FRANCE: Weekend of anti-fascist resistance in Calais, 5-7 September and Defence Of Migrant&nbsp;Squats</a>”</li><li>“<a href="https://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2014/11/20/palestine-sexual-violence-womens-bodies-and-israeli-settler-colonialism/#more-2130" target="_blank">PALESTINE: Sexual Violence, Women`s Bodies, and Israeli Settler&nbsp;Colonialism</a>”&nbsp;</li></ul><b><a href="http://www.talk2action.org/" target="_blank">Talk To Action</a></b>&nbsp;is a leading forum for research and analysis on the Christian right in the United States, covering topics such as Christian Reconstructionism, the New Apostolic Reformation movement, Opus Dei, the Left Behind book series, biblical patriarchy, and the ties between Christian rightists and the neo-confederate movement. Regular contributors include Rachel Tabachnick, Frederick Clarkson, Bill Berkowitz, Frank Cocozzelli, and others. Here’s some of their recent work: <br /><ul><li>“<a href="http://www.talk2action.org/story/2015/4/25/175111/478/Front_Page/Whither_the_Christian_Right_in_the_Democratic_Party_" target="_blank">Whither the Christian Right in the Democratic Party?</a>”</li><li>“<a href="http://www.talk2action.org/story/2015/5/28/102319/989/Dominionism_in_the_military/The_Duggar_Family_the_Girl_Scouts_and_the_Christian_Right_s_War_on_Transgender_People" target="_blank">The Duggar Family, the Girl Scouts, and the Christian Right's War on Transgender People</a>”</li><li>“<a href="http://www.talk2action.org/story/2015/5/2/23934/31208/Front_Page/Could_Support_for_LGBTQ_Rights_Disrupt_the_Coalition_of_Jews_and_Evangelical_Christian_Zionists_" target="_blank">Could Support for LGBTQ Rights Disrupt the Coalition of Jews and Evangelical Christian Zionists?</a>”</li></ul><b><a href="http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/" target="_blank">We Hunted the Mammoth</a></b> (WHTM) is freelance writer David Futrelle's blog about the “Manosphere” — an online antifeminist subculture that has exploded in recent years, largely outside traditional right-wing patriarchal networks such as the Christian right. In Futrelle's words, “WHTM tracks and mocks the New Misogyny online, focusing especially on Men's Rights, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and Pickup Artist (PUA) sites.” The phrase “We hunted the mammoth” comes from an old Men's Rights quote&nbsp;about all the unappreciated things men had supposedly done for women since the Stone Age. (Futrelle used to call his blog Manboobz, which he concedes was “kind of a dopey name.”) <br /><ul><li>“<a href="http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/05/28/you-wont-be-shocked-by-this-crappy-return-of-kings-post-telling-men-not-to-date-girls-who-claim-they-were-raped/" target="_blank">You Won’t Be Shocked by This Crappy Return of Kings Post Telling Men Not to Date ‘Girls Who Claim They Were&nbsp;Raped’</a>”</li><li>“<a href="http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/05/26/toronto-police-investigating-pua-who-posted-video-saying-a-woman-should-be-stabbed-and-cut-up-into-tiny-pieces/" target="_blank">Toronto police investigating PUA who posted video saying a woman should be ‘stabbed and cut up into tiny&nbsp;pieces’</a>”</li><li>“<a href="http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/05/25/women-enjoy-being-forced-to-do-things-just-like-children-creepy-as-hell-red-pill-redditor-observes/" target="_blank">‘Women enjoy being forced to do things, just like children,’ creepy-as-hell Red Pill Redditor&nbsp;observes</a>”</li></ul><b>Photo credit</b>: By Reategui12 (Own work) [<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)" target="_blank">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>], via Wikimedia Commons.<br /><br /><br /><ul></ul>Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-34837376691456204082015-05-30T06:07:00.000-04:002015-05-30T06:07:38.805-04:00New look for ThreeWayFightI'm working on ThreeWayFight again after a hiatus of a few months, and have updated the design template for the first time in many years. Time for a change.<br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-30179012860962862962015-02-05T21:56:00.001-05:002015-03-20T13:16:11.566-04:00The National Prayer Breakfast: validating theocracy<br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xF4DdwQ8Pp4/VNQqc4SJOQI/AAAAAAAAADg/ZZTVYQvYPRQ/s1600/Barack_Obama_speaks_at_National_Prayer_Breakfast_2-5-09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xF4DdwQ8Pp4/VNQqc4SJOQI/AAAAAAAAADg/ZZTVYQvYPRQ/s1600/Barack_Obama_speaks_at_National_Prayer_Breakfast_2-5-09.jpg" height="179" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Barack Obama speaks at National Prayer Breakfast 2-5-09</td></tr></tbody></table>This morning, as he has done every February since 2009, Barack Obama addressed the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. The National Prayer Breakfast is sponsored by a secretive theocratic Christian organization known as The Family or The Fellowship, a group I first learned about from Jeff Sharlet’s scathing 2008 exposé,&nbsp;<i><a href="http://jeffsharlet.com/content/about-the-family/" target="_blank">The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power</a></i>. Here’s a quote from my <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2010/08/bringing-elite-to-jesus.html" target="_blank">review</a> of Sharlet’s book:<br /><br /><blockquote>“The Family is all about power. It believes that the wealthy and powerful are chosen by God, and its mission as an organization centers on bringing them to Jesus, bringing them into a spiritual ‘covenant’ of total unity with each other. ‘Hitler made a covenant,’ [Family head] Doug Coe is apparently fond of saying. ‘The Mafia makes a covenant. It is a very powerful thing’ -- all the more so when it is based on submission to Jesus (54). The Family teaches that those who hold worldly power, as long as they pledge obedience to Jesus, can kill, torture, rape, steal, and lie on a mass scale with no moral constraints whatsoever. This, too, sets the Family apart. Christian rightists generally present themselves as defenders of civic morality. However twisted or hypocritical that claim may be in practice, it's a far cry from the Family's absolute repudiation of ethical principles.”</blockquote>Every president of the United States since Eisenhower has been a featured speaker at the National Prayer Breakfast, validating and bolstering the influence of the theocratic organization that sponsors it. With rare exceptions, mainstream media treats this as completely uncontroversial.<br /><br />But as former Christian rightist Frank Schaeffer asked in a 2010 <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frank-schaeffer/would-obama-speak-for-a-k_b_447468.html" target="_blank">column</a>, “Would President Obama speak at a prayer breakfast organized by the KKK? Would Jim Wallis and other ‘progressive’ Christians attend?”<br /><br />Because The Family doesn’t just work with hardline conservatives. It’s also happy to work with moderates and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, anyone who will help further its work of Christianizing the ruling class. Hillary Clinton, for example, has had a <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/09/hillarys-prayer-hillary-clintons-religion-and-politics" target="_blank">close relationship</a> with The Family for a decade or more.<br /><br />(For more on this group, see also Sharlet’s follow-up book, <i><a href="http://truth-out.org/archive/component/k2/item/93642:the-family--who-really-is-behind-this-secret-organization" target="_blank">C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy</a></i>, which among other things details the Family’s involvement in Uganda, including heavy support for the 2009 bill that would have made homosexuality punishable by death.)<br /><br />Photo credit: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABarack_Obama_speaks_at_National_Prayer_Breakfast_2-5-09.jpg">Pete Souza [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons</a><br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-5089013562234596722015-02-02T22:39:00.000-05:002015-02-15T20:42:42.860-05:00Moscow conference draws fascists, neo-Confederates, U.S. leftists<br />For decades, some far right opponents of the U.S. empire have been trying to make common cause with leftists. They got another opportunity in December 2014 at an international conference in Moscow on the “Right of Peoples to Self-Determination and Building a Multi-Polar World.” The conference was organized by the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR). Participants included U.S. leftists from the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) and the International Action Center (IAC) -- both of which are closely associated with the Workers World Party -- alongside Russian and Italian fascists and U.S. white nationalists from the neo-Confederate group League of the South. It’s worth looking at this convergence in some detail as it speaks to an important pitfall confronting leftists involved in anti-imperialist coalitions.<br /><br />UNAC and IAC articles about the Multi-Polar World conference portrayed it as a progressive event against war, racist violence, and repression. The IAC <a href="http://www.iacenter.org/actions/moscow-conf010715/" target="_blank">reported</a>, “Major themes of the discussion were the US-backed war against the people of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine, the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet Union and economic war against Russia, Venezuela and Iran, and the ongoing uprising against racism and police brutality in the United States.” Neither IAC nor UNAC mentioned that a number of far right groups were represented. UNAC did note that attendees included Israel Shamir, “a leading anti-Zionist writer from Israel,” but didn’t mention that Shamir is also a notorious <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20111002073436/http://www.ibishblog.com/article/2001/04/16/serious_conserns_about_israel_shamir" target="_blank">antisemite</a>. <br /><br />The conference <a href="http://truth-out.org/speakout/item/28647-declaration-the-right-of-peoples-to-self-determination-and-building-a-multipolar-world" target="_blank">declaration</a> was in keeping with the UNAC/IAC portrayal. It called for an international “united front against discrimination, violation of human rights, religious and racial intolerance” and condemned the “predatory foreign policy of the US and its NATO allies.” The declaration also denounced the oppression of people of color in the U.S. and demanded the release of U.S. political prisoners such as Palestinian activist Rasmia Oda, Leonard Peltier, and Mumia Abu Jamal. The declaration urged “the consolidation of the progressive part of mankind” and promised that “we will make every effort to build a multi-polar world!” <br /><br />Maybe it’s a coincidence, but the phrase “multi-polar world” is a <a href="http://openrevolt.info/2012/05/06/alexander-dugin-for-our-people-and-the-truth/" target="_blank">major theme</a> in the work of Aleksandr Dugin, Russia’s leading fascist theoretician, as in his 2012 book, <i>The Theory of a Multi-Polar World</i>. Dugin is leader of the Eurasia Party and the international Eurasianist movement; he <a href="http://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/aleksandr-dugin-russian-version-the-european-radical-right-2006" target="_blank">envisions</a> a renewed Eurasian “empire” based on authoritarianism, patriarchy, and traditional religion, in which Russians will play a “messianic” role. Dugin disavows biological racism but has called for “the rebirth of the primordial Aryan conscience.” <br /><br />It’s unclear to me how close the relationship is between the Anti-Globalization Movement and Dugin, but members of the Duginist Eurasian Youth Union took part in the AGMR’s December 2014 conference and have worked with AGMR at <a href="http://tishreen.news.sy/tishreen/public/print/302400" target="_blank">other events</a>.<br /><br />Like Dugin, the AGMR envisions a broad alliance of political forces against U.S. imperialism, ranging from grassroots social movements to Communist Party states to right-wing dictators. The lynchpin of this alliance is Russia. The AGMR <a href="http://anti-global.ru/" target="_blank">website</a> features a list of seven “Faces of Antiglobalization,” almost all of whom are or were friendly with Putin’s government: Belorussian president Alexander Lukashenko, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s ex-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the late Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Venezuela’s deceased left populist president Hugo Chavez, and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. The one outlier on the list -- and only non-state figure -- is Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, whose 1994 uprising was a pivotal event in the global justice movement’s development. <br /><br />The overall position statement on the AGMR website opposes “the emerging unipolar world” – i.e., the international dominance of the United States and its allies – and “supports the full sovereignty of nation-states including the sovereignty of Russia as an independent player on the political, economic and cultural world stage.” <br /><br />The AGMR position statement seems carefully designed to appeal to both leftists and rightists. For the leftish side, it criticizes “the global dominance of transnational corporations and supranational trade and financial institutions.” For the other end of the spectrum, it warns against “the attempts to impose a ‘new world order’” and the threat of “a single mega-totalitarian world state,” both of which are standard targets of right-wing conspiracy theories. AGMR also “aims to promote all aspects of the national security and traditional moral values.” (According to <a href="http://www.interfax-religion.com/?act=news&amp;div=10609" target="_blank">Interfax</a> news service, the AGMR joined with several rightist groups in 2013 to plan a public protest against same-sex marriage outside the French embassy.) <br /><br />The AGMR position statement also includes a lot of language about tolerance and self-determination, for example, “respect for other peoples and their sovereignty, value systems and lifestyles.” Such phrases appeal to both leftists and liberals, but are also favored by the neofascists of the European New Right (ENR), who have replaced traditional fascist talk of national or racial supremacy with slick appeals to “<a href="http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/russian/nationalism/shekhovtsov2.html" target="_blank">ethno-pluralism</a>” and “<a href="http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/debenoist/alain9.html" target="_blank">biocultural diversity</a>.” Aleksandr Dugin is the ENR’s leading representative in Russia. <br /><br />On one of its web pages, AGMR also gives a <a href="http://anti-global.ru/antiglobalizm-v-rossii/" target="_blank">hat tip</a> to the Lyndon LaRouche network as some of the “like-minded people” from around the world who took part in conferences that laid the groundwork for the AGMR’s founding. The LaRouchites promote a quirky crypto-fascist ideology and in recent years have become increasingly aligned with the Russian government on geostrategic issues, for example <a href="http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2014/4109vitrenko_statement_nazi_regime.html" target="_blank">echoing</a> a pro-Russian line on the civil wars in Syria and Ukraine. <br /><br />In addition to the Duginists from the Eurasian Youth Union, the December 2014 Multi-Polar World conference also included representatives of the right-wing Rodina Party (which in 2005 was <a href="http://www.kommersant.com/p630171/r_500/Moscow_Election_Cleared_of_Rodina/" target="_blank">barred</a> from participating in Moscow Duma elections for inciting racial hatred against immigrants) and the Italian neofascist group Millennium, which has had a <a href="http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com/2014/06/italian-fascists-from-millennium-ally.html" target="_blank">close relationship</a> with Dugin’s organization for several years. In December 2013, AGMR head Alexander Ionov <a href="http://www.unita.it/italia/milano-esterma-destra-a-convegno-br-scontri-con-gli-antagonisti-1.545727" target="_blank">spoke</a> at a Millennium-sponsored far right conference in Milan.&nbsp; <br /><br />The Multi-Polar World conference also drew representatives from Novorossiya, or New Russia, the entity in eastern Ukraine that, with Russian backing, has declared its independence from Kiev. The UNAC/IAC folks portray the Ukrainian conflict as aggression by neonazis and U.S. imperialists against the people of eastern Ukraine – utterly ignoring the Russian <a href="http://www.socialistproject.org/international/the-russian-far-right/" target="_blank">far rightists</a> who are heavily involved in the eastern separatist movement, as well as the Russian government’s own expansionist aims in the region. <br /><br />U.S. participants in the Multi-Polar World conference included representatives of two southern secessionist groups, the League of the South and the Texas Nationalist Movement, who promoted their own version of “self-determination.” League of the South President Michael Hill spoke at the Multi-Polar World conference and offered a <a href="http://leagueofthesouth.com/the-league-of-the-south-takes-its-southern-nationalist-message-to-moscow/" target="_blank">report</a> on the LS website: &nbsp; <br /><blockquote>“Hill discussed The League of the South and its goal of the survival, well-being, and independence of the Southern people and how the South’s identity as an historic ‘blood and soil’ nation conflicts with the current globalist agenda of the USA regime. He emphasized the importance of The League’s work not only in preserving a particular people living on a particular land, but also its direct Southern nationalist challenge to the political, economic, and financial engine of globalism—the Washington, DC/European Union alliance.” </blockquote>While the <a href="http://texnat.org/" target="_blank">Texas Nationalist Movement</a> seems to avoid taking positions on other political issues besides Texas independence, the League of the South is well known for its <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-hutson/not-just-whistling-dixie_b_5636221.html" target="_blank">advocacy</a> of white nationalism and Christian theocracy. Still, it’s a bit surprising to see them openly invoking the Nazi-identified phrase “blood and soil.”<br /><br />The Multi-Polar World conference has drawn some criticism. In a mid-January email to the UFPJ-Activist listserv (UFPJ = United for Peace and Justice), Andrew Pollack criticized UNAC leaders’ participation in the conference. Pollack denounced the presence of U.S. white supremacists at the event and the AGMR’s involvement in homophobic activism and support for dictators Gaddafi and Assad. He also highlighted the UNAC representatives’ praise for the Putin regime, as in the following passage from UNAC co-chair Joe Lombardo’s official <a href="http://stop-imperialism.com/2014/12/30/4923/" target="_blank">report</a> on the conference: <br /><blockquote>“While in Moscow, we also watched the TV coverage of Russian president Putin giving his annual press conference…. During the press conference, Putin gave figures to show that their economy has been growing in the past year. He then addressed the question of the falling ruble. He explained that they will be able to weather the crisis but it has pushed them into a position where they need to create more diversity in their economy. This, he projects to happen within a two-year time period… <br /><br />“Moscow is a modern city much like any large U.S. city. The people were dressed well, and looked healthy and cared for. We learned that many of the social benefits that existed under the Soviet Union still exist. These include free universal healthcare. For most people, college was free, and students received a stipend for their living expenses. Putin is very popular with a high approval rating among the Russian people. The people see him as a kind of populist leader.”</blockquote>Pollack commented, “If only someone would tell the Russian working class how well off they are!” He concluded: “Lombardo announced that ‘The leaders of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia have expressed an interest in attending UNAC’s conference in May.’ Let’s make sure the racist scum who UNAC is playing footsie with don’t come!” <br /><br />In an email reply to Pollack, Lombardo wrote that the AGMR supported gay rights and its leaders denied having joined any anti-gay demonstration. Lombardo also stated that the Multi-Polar World conference organizers strongly repudiated the views of the Texas secessionists who attended, and that the organizers’ participation in a Black Lives Matter solidarity protest at the U.S. embassy proved they oppose racism. <br /><br />Maybe the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia’s extensive contacts with fascists and right-wing nationalists result from bad judgment rather than ideological affinity. Either way, their Multi-Polar World conference provided a useful service for far rightists who want to sanitize their image among liberal and leftist audiences. <br /><br />Unfortunately, UNAC and IAC aren’t the only leftists willing to play along with this. Marxist academician Efe Can Gürcan, for example, recently <a href="http://sdonline.org/62/natos-globalized-atlanticism-and-the-eurasian-alternative/" target="_blank">discussed</a> Eurasianism (specifically including Duginism) as an ideological challenge to NATO and US imperialism, but didn’t mention that Aleksandr Dugin is a fascist. When I objected, Gürcan replied that “One should not avoid potentially transformative dialogue with such movements [as Dugin’s] merely because they are not leftist or because their practices are in some areas objectionable” (<a href="http://sdonline.org/back-issues/" target="_blank"><i>Socialism and Democracy</i></a>, March 2014, p. 170). As a self-delusional rationale for red-brown coalition building, this is hard to beat. <br /><br /><i>Special thanks to Michael Pugliese for pointing me to much of the information in this post, and to Andrew Pollack for permission to quote from his UFPJ-Activist memo.</i>Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-30785414675908106512014-12-20T06:01:00.000-05:002014-12-20T06:01:08.615-05:00Interview with an Antifascist Prisoner in Sweden<br />The following interview is being mirrored from Kersplebedeb at <a href="http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/interview-with-an-antifascist-prisoner-in-sweden/" target="_blank">http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/interview-with-an-antifascist-prisoner-in-sweden/</a><br /><br /><div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /><img alt="sthlmantifa" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-8381" src="http://kersplebedeb.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/sthlmantifa.jpg" height="305" width="458" /></div><i>Joel is an antifascist prisoner in Sweden. In July 2014, he was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for attempted murder, violent disorder, and carrying an illegal weapon. The sentence followed a collective defense against a Nazi attack on an antifascist demonstration in Stockholm. The interview was conducted in the fall of 2014. Explanatory notes have been added.</i><br /><br /><b>You were sentenced in connection with an antifascist demonstration in Kärrtorp, a suburb of Stockholm, in December 2013. Can you tell us about that day?</b><br /><br />During the weeks before the demonstration, there had been trouble in Kärrtorp and the neighboring suburbs. The Swedish Resistance Movement (Svenska motst<span style="font-size: small;">å</span>ndsrörelsen, SMR) had tried to establish itself in the area. They went through the usual Nazi routine of spraying swastikas on the local school and attacking people who have no place in the world they envision – in some cases with knives.<br /><br />I'm not sure, but I think Network Line 17 already existed before the demonstration. In any case, it was this network that organized it. (1) There were indications that Nazis might show up to disrupt the event, but when I checked in with people in the morning it seemed that everything was going to be fine. Since there was a solidarity benefit for an imprisoned antifascist the same night, I thought I would only stop by the demonstration for a short while before heading into town to help prepare the evening event. When I got to Kärrtorp with a few friends, we were about ten minutes late.<br /><br />Five minutes later, the Nazis came. (2) We saw them from about 200 yards away. Everything became very chaotic; we weren't prepared and spread out across the square. We also had very little to defend ourselves with. The Nazis began to shower us with bottles. It didn't seem to matter to them that there were many children and pensioners among us. They advanced onto the square while we retreated.<br /><br />One of the strongest memories I have from that day is a policewoman standing between us and the Nazis and then suddenly running away. When I read the police report later, I understood that she went to get her helmet because of all the flying bottles, but at the time it felt like this was going to get really dangerous, even life-threatening. Everyone knows how happy SMR members are to use their knives. (3)<br /><br />Once the initial confusion was over, we managed to gather and start a counterattack. We stopped the Nazis' advance but that was not good enough. A front line formed. The police didn't have a clue what was going on and beat us at least as hard as the Nazis. It was still chaotic, but now we were at least coordinated. We pushed back the Nazis further, and this is when I first saw one of them with a knife. I started heading towards him but lost sight. Meanwhile, the Nazis tried to regain ground. There were serious skirmishes and I saw another Nazi with a knife. If, at that point, the Nazis had gotten the upper hand and one of us had fallen to the ground, it could have been fatal. That's when the Nazi closest to us got stabbed.<br /><br />A number of demonstrators who had first left the square now returned. With their help, we managed to push the Nazis from the square to the adjacent bus station, then past some buildings out into the forest. More police arrived only when we were already at the bus station. I had hurt my knee in the melee and didn't go with the others. Soon, the police shielded off the Nazis and protected them. (4) I waited for my friends to return to the square, then I went, as planned, into town to help prepare the evening event.<br /><br /><b>You said that it wasn't "good enough" to stop the Nazis' advance. What do you mean by that?</b><br /><br />It is important to understand that the Nazis came to attack us. They didn't come to have a counter-rally, as they claim. Had it been up to them, they would have chased everyone from the square and, ideally, hurt some folks in the process. The attack was not just about preventing people from taking a stand against them, it was also about propaganda. The goal was to prevent any resistance to their recruitment efforts in the area and to use the action itself as a recruitment tool. Anyone who doesn't understand this, chooses to ignore reality. Kärrtorp isn't unique, that's how it works everywhere. If we don't fight on the streets, where are we going to fight?<br /><br />I'm digressing, but it's really important to point out how crucial it was to not only stop them but to chase them out of Kärrtorp. If you want their activities to end, this is needed.<br /><br /><b>You also mentioned that everyone knows how happy SMR members are to use their knives. Can you give examples?</b><br /><br />The readiness of SMR members to use knives is well documented. About a year before the Kärrtorp attack, a person was stabbed to death by SMR members in Vallentuna, just outside of Stockholm. Only a few days before the Kärrtorp attack, someone was severely injured just a few suburbs away. And at least one of the people who murdered the union activist Björn Söderberg (rest in peace) was connected to SMR. (5) There are more examples, but these should suffice. SMR tries to attract people – mostly young ones – with revolutionary romanticism and a sense of community that builds more on violence than ideology.<br /><br /><b>When did you get arrested?</b><br /><br />About a week later. I was picking up my son from school.<br /><br /><b>It seems that you've been active in Sweden's antifascist movement for quite some time. Can you tell us a little about this?</b><br /><br />I grew up in Linköping during the 1980s and '90s. Just like in the rest of Sweden and Europe, Nazis were on the rise. In Sweden, the "Laser Man" wreaked havoc, and the band Ultima Thule topped the charts. (6) Linköping was strongly affected by this. It was a center for the production of White Power music and several leaders of the different Nazi organizations that existed in Sweden at the time were living in or around the town.<br /><br />I was born in Chile, so I have personally experienced the everyday racism that still exists in Sweden. When I was little, I was physically attacked by Nazis. Once I got older, I started to fight back and defend myself. I realized that this made things much easier for me.<br /><br />When I was 13 years old, I started going to hardcore punk shows. At the time, the hardcore punk scene was much more political than today. At a gig in 1995, someone asked me if I wanted to travel with him to Denmark to protest a march celebrating the German Nazi Rudolf Hess. I didn't hesitate a second.<br /><br />It was during this trip that I really embraced antifascism. I hadn't known that there was a real antifascist movement out there. Everything in Denmark seemed so organized. There were lots of people from all ages at the demonstration, and this didn't change even when we got into skirmishes with the police trying to keep us away from the Nazis. You could call it an initiating experience. It took some time before I got organized myself, but it was during this trip that I really understood that I was an antifascist.<br /><br /><b>Was the antifascist movement in Denmark better organized at the time than in Sweden? Has this changed?</b><br /><br />I can't really say how well antifascists were organized in other parts of Sweden at the time, but in Linköping there was no organization at all, or at least you didn't notice it. In the late 1990s, however, an extraparliamentary left developed in Linköping as well.<br /><br />I don't want to go into details regarding antifascist organizing in Sweden, but once I had gotten involved myself, I noticed that things were really progressing. All aspects improved: research, recruitment, infrastructure. We only dropped the ball in one respect, and that was tactics. While the Nazis experimented successfully with new forms of politics, we didn't make that leap.<br /><br /><b>Is the far right a big danger in Sweden? What does the movement look like today?</b><br /><br />That depends on how you define the far right. The Sweden Democrats are now the country's third biggest party. I reckon that is a big threat. (7) It seems that the political situation in Sweden mirrors that in the rest of Europe. Far-right parties are gaining ground everywhere.<br /><br />With respect to Nazi organizations, there is little risk that they will enter parliament. (8) But Nazis will always pose a physical threat to anyone fighting them. Whenever Nazis are left alone, they grow. This is evident if you look at what has happened in Sweden during the last ten years: in towns where antifascists were strong, Nazis pretty much had to abandon their efforts. Those who deny that connection don't know what they are talking about.<br /><br />Antifascist activism can sometimes feel tough and unrewarding, but in a town like Örebro, for example, where Nazis were very active just a few years ago, there is now basically no activity at all. Other towns where militant struggle on the street has brought results are Linköping and Gothenburg. For different reasons, Stockholm is a difficult town to work in, but even there Nazis have been pushed back several times.<br /><br /><b>Internationally, Sweden is still seen as an open and liberal country. How does this go together with the far-right currents that you're describing?</b><br /><br />I think that whenever Nazis go from talk to action, that is, when they kill immigrants or rob banks, it is usually swept under the carpet. And whenever this is not possible – for example in the case of Malexander (9) or Kärrtorp – the politicians make a big media circus out of it, full of condemnation and outrage. So either Nazis aren't seen as a problem, or, when they are, the politicians give the impression that they will take care of it.<br /><br /><b>What are the perspectives for the country's left?</b><br /><br />I assume you mean the extraparliamentary left. Not sure if I'm the right person to ask since I'll be out of the game for some time, but I think there needs to be better collaboration between different leftist groups and we need to establish more common goals.<br /><br /><b>Can you give examples for such goals?</b><br /><br />I think we should be active in the areas that concern us all, especially in those where the underclass is attacked most heavily – this concerns, for example, the privatization of council flats or precarious labor relations. I also think that it is important to engage in small projects where you can actually experience victories and see that it's possible to change things. That's crucial for our morale. A good example was the campaign against JobbJakt.<br /><br /><b>What was it about?</b><br /><br />JobbJakt is a website offering jobs. Some years ago, they wanted to introduce a bidding feature where the person ready to do the job for the lowest wage would get it. So, say, someone wants his bathroom redone, and then one person offers to do it for 150 crowns an hour, another for 100 crowns, etc. This is clearly wage dumping and hostile to the working class. It was important for us not to let such practices take root in Sweden and so we campaigned against the website – successfully.<br /><br /><b>You've been stressing the importance of organization in political work. Can you elaborate on this?</b><br /><br />The importance of organization speaks for itself. If we do things together we are stronger. How exactly we are organized is secondary. It can be in a band, a union, a militant group, a pacifist group, a cultural center, a social center, a publishing house, a bookshop, or whatever. It doesn't need to be die-hard activism either. But it's important that organizing doesn't stop with your own project. We need to make use of our movement's diversity. Networks and umbrella organizations are important. At this point, the extraparliamentary left hardly feels like a movement at all.<br /><br /><b>What is your personal situation like? As a prisoner, what kind of support do you consider most important?</b><br /><br />Right now, I'm at the prison in Kumla waiting for an evaluation. Kumla is a "Class 1 Prison" in Sweden, that is, a maximum security facility. Once the evaluation is done, I will probably be transferred to another maximum security facility. (10)<br /><br />Support? I'd be very happy if more people got active and, especially, organized.<br /><br /><b>Some final words?</b><br /><br />Let me quote Madball: "Times are changing for the worse / Gotta keep a positive outlook / Growing up in such violent times / Have some faith and you'll get by."<br /><br /><i>If you want to send mail to Joel, please check the current address at the Facebook page "Free Joel".</i><br /><br /><br /><b>Notes:</b><br /><br />(1) The Network Line 17 (Nätverket Linje 17) is a network of community groups along the southern end of Stockholm's subway line 17.<br /><br />(2) There were about thirty SMR members involved in the attack.<br /><br />(3) During the attack, there were only about a handful of police officers present. Reinforcements took several minutes to arrive.<br /><br />(4) Twenty-eight SMR members were arrested. So far, sixteen have gone to court, seven of whom have been sentenced. The highest sentence so far has been eight months in prison for violent disorder.<br /><br />(5) On September 21, 2012, Joakim Karlsson was murdered in Vallentuna. On December 7, 2013, Fidel Ogu was severely injured in Hökarängen. On October 12, 1999, Björn Söderberg was killed outside his apartment in Sätra in southern Stockholm.<br /><br />(6) From August 1991 to January 1992, the "Laser Man" John Ausonius killed one person, the Iranian student Jimmy Ranjbar, and severely injured ten more in a series of shootings targeting people he considered "foreign" (in the beginning, Ausonius used a rifle with a laser sight, hence the name). Ultima Thule was a popular Swedish rock band with ties to the neo-Nazi milieu.<br /><br />(7) At the 2014 parliamentary elections, the far-right Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) received 12.86% of the vote.<br /><br />(8) The Party of the Swedes (Svenskarnas parti), which until recently was called the National Socialist Front (Nationalsocialistisk front), also participated in the elections. It received 0.07% of the vote.<br /><br />(9) On May 28, 1999, two policemen were shot dead by neo-Nazis in the small town of Malexander in southern Sweden following a bank robbery.<br /><br />(10) Shortly after the completion of this interview, Joel was moved to the maximum security prison of Tidaholm. For updates, please see the Facebook page "<a href="https://www.facebook.com/freejoel" target="_blank">Free Joel</a>".<br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-75974733637650862712014-08-28T15:01:00.002-04:002014-08-28T15:02:39.329-04:00Philadelphia march against racists and rapists: September 6<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OwFJwrBKdX4/U_97TOmizkI/AAAAAAAAADA/e8FIBxgDTBY/s1600/capture1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OwFJwrBKdX4/U_97TOmizkI/AAAAAAAAADA/e8FIBxgDTBY/s320/capture1.jpg" height="223" width="400" /></a></div><br /><a href="http://phillyantifa.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Philly Antifa</a> is organizing a march against two white supremacist groups that have been active in Philadelphia: a Ku Klux Klan group (East Coast Knights of the Truly Visible Empire) headed by William Walters, and the Keystone State Skinheads (KSS), which is also known as Keystone United or the Be Active Front USA. The march will take place on Saturday, September 6th, in the Tacony section of Philadelphia.<br /><br />The organizers write: "Like Walters’ Klan group, KSS claims to not be racist or violent.&nbsp; But like the KKK, members of KSS have been involved in assault, rape and murder, often purely because of the victims race. In fact, the head (and co-founder) of KSS, Steve Smith, is a former Klansman himself."<br /><br /><a href="http://phillyantifa.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/march-against-racists-and-rapists-philadelphia/#respond" target="_blank">Read more</a><br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-58511192820215852912014-08-20T22:34:00.002-04:002014-09-08T21:08:56.774-04:00Anti-State Politics on the Far Right: audio and readings<br />I gave a talk on "Anti-State Politics on the Far Right" at the A-Space Anarchist Community Center in Philadelphia, 9 June 2014. An audio recording of the talk is available <a href="http://suzy.defenestrator.org/Matthew%20Lyons%20on%20Far%20Right%20Antistatism%20June%209%202014.mp3" target="_blank">here</a>. (Thanks to Suzy S. for recording it!)<br /><br />This is the description of the talk from the A-Space calendar: <br /><blockquote>"In the era of Hitler and Mussolini, fascists glorified strong nation-states and highly disciplined, top-down organizations. But today, many far rightists advocate political decentralization. Some neo-nazis argue that any law enforcement above the county level is illegitimate, while others promote a strategy of “leaderless resistance” to establish an all-white society. Some far rightists even call themselves anarchists, notably the National-Anarchists, who call for a decentralized system of separate ethnic groups. Meanwhile, one of the most hardline branches of the Christian Right, known as Christian Reconstructionists, wants to impose a theocracy based on biblical law, which would be enforced mainly through local institutions, especially the church and the patriarchal family.<br /><br /> "Matthew Lyons will discuss how anti-state politics became so popular on the far right, what the main versions of it look like, and how it relates to the far right’s commitment to social hierarchy and exclusion. He will also address efforts by some far rightists to build alliances with anarchists and other leftists, and how leftists have responded."</blockquote>Here is a short list of readings that I used in preparing the talk: <br /><br /><b>Leaderless Resistance</b><br />"<a href="http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/terrorism/insurgency/timeline.html" target="_blank">Selected Timeline: Amoss's 'Leaderless Resistance,' Beam's Revised Version, &amp; White Supemacist Insurgency in the U.S.</a>"<br /><br />Louis Beam, "<a href="http://www.louisbeam.com/leaderless.htm" target="_blank">Leaderless Resistance</a>"<br /><br /><b>Posse Comitatus</b><br />Chip Berlet, "<a href="http://www.publiceye.org/rightist/idennlns.html" target="_blank">Christian Identity, Survivalism &amp; the Posse Comitatus</a>"<br /><br />Southern Poverty Law Center, "<a href="http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement" target="_blank">Sovereign Citizens Movement</a>"<br /><br /><b>Christian Reconstructionism</b><br />Fred Clarkson, "<a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v08n1/chrisrec.html" target="_blank">Christian Reconstructionism: Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence</a>" <br /><br />Kathryn Joyce, "<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/arrows-war#" target="_blank">Arrows for the War</a>"<br /><br />Michael J. McVicar, "<a href="http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v22n3/libertarian.html" target="_blank">The Libertarian Theocrats: The Long, Strange History of R.J. Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionism</a>"<br /><br />Rachel Tabachnick, "<a href="http://www.talk2action.org/story/2010/7/13/115425/990" target="_blank">Rushdoony and Theocratic Libertarians on Slavery</a>"<br /><br /><b>National-Anarchists</b><br />Graham D. Macklin, "<a href="http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=2439" target="_blank">Coopting the Counter Culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction</a>"<br /><br />Sasha, "<a href="http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2014/04/29/the-new-face-of-the-radical-right/" target="_blank">The New Face of the Radical Right?</a>"<br /><br />Spencer Sunshine, "<a href="http://www.politicalresearch.org/2008/01/28/rebranding-fascism-national-anarchists/" target="_blank">Rebranding Fascism: National-Anarchists</a>"<br /><br />National-Anarchist Movement, "<a href="http://www.national-anarchist.net/2010/09/national-anarchist-movement-manifesto_18.html" target="_blank">N-AM Manifesto</a>"<br /><br />Troy Southgate, "<a href="http://www.national-anarchist.net/2010/09/case-for-national-anarchist-entryism-by.html" target="_blank">The Case for National-Anarchist Entryism</a>"<br /><br /><b>Attack the System</b><br />Matthew N. Lyons, "<a href="http://newpol.org/content/rising-above-herd-keith-prestons-authoritarian-anti-statism" target="_blank">Rising Above the Herd: Keith Preston's Authoritarian Anti-Statism</a>"<br /><br /><b>Far right overtures to leftists</b><br />Matthew N. Lyons, "<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2011/11/rightists-woo-occupy-wall-street.html" target="_blank">Rightists woo the Occupy Wall Street movement</a>" <br /><br />NYC Antifa, "<a href="http://nycantifa.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/nata-unwanted-at-anarchist-bookfair-420-conference-or-seemingly-anywhere-else/" target="_blank">NATA Unwanted at Anarchist Bookfair, 4/20 Conference, or seemingly anywhere&nbsp;else</a>" <br /><br />Spencer Sunshine, "<a href="http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/02/23/the-right-hand-of-occupy-wall-street-from-libertarians-to-nazis-the-fact-and-fiction-of-right-wing-involvement/" target="_blank">The Right Hand of Occupy Wall Street: From Libertarians to Nazis, the Fact and Fiction of Right-Wing Involvement</a>"Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-35804851533800281232014-08-09T09:28:00.001-04:002014-08-10T15:58:07.930-04:00Mythologizing the Holocaust<blockquote>"[The Israeli leadership] draw[s] an analogy between the Nazis and the Arabs, with the corollary that Jewish destiny is the same everywhere, in Israel or in the Diaspora, like a mark of Cain branded on Jewish brows from the beginning of time by mysterious, supernatural forces: We are always an object of hatred and the urge to annihilate, here and everywhere, now and always. The only difference between Israel and the Diaspora is that in Israel we can fight back, whereas in the Diaspora we have no alternative but ‘to be led to the slaughter like sheep'" (18).<br /><br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; --Boaz Evron, "Holocaust: The Uses of Disaster"</blockquote><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZZeYTRfvfcc/U-YMV1ZvS5I/AAAAAAAAACw/KPYmzBeT_Yg/s1600/Remembering_Holocaust_during_the_siege.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZZeYTRfvfcc/U-YMV1ZvS5I/AAAAAAAAACw/KPYmzBeT_Yg/s1600/Remembering_Holocaust_during_the_siege.jpg" height="285" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 28.05pt 56.15pt 84.2pt 112.3pt 1.95in 168.45pt 196.55pt 224.6pt 252.7pt 3.9in 308.85pt 336.95pt; text-autospace: none;"><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ARemembering_Holocaust_during_the_siege.jpg" target="_blank">Israeli soldiers in Gaza strip observe moment of silence for Holocaust victims</a>, 1 May 2008<span style="font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; mso-bidi-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;"></span></div></td></tr></tbody></table>I first read these words in 1983, when they appeared in <i>Radical America</i>. Since then, others have written cogently about Zionism and the memory of Nazi genocide, but Boaz Evron's essay is the one that first spoke to me as a young radical Jew, and it remains a classic that's well worth revisiting today. As the Israeli military bombs homes, schools, hospitals, and playgrounds in Gaza, as Israeli politicians call for Palestinians to be <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/israeli-calls-palestinian-blood-ring-fever-pitch/13578%20" target="_blank">killed and mutilated</a> or refer to Palestinian children as "<a href="http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/knesset-genocide-against.html%20" target="_blank">snakes</a>" whose mothers should be wiped out, one of the core rationales that Israel's apologists offer is the need to protect Jews against the danger of "another Holocaust" -- whether from Hamas or rising anti-Jewish incidents in Europe. Even when this argument isn't stated explicitly, it's often just below the surface, a core tenet of post-1945 Zionist ideology. It's a powerful argument not because it makes sense, but because it draws on real human fears and an immense memory of suffering. <br /><br />In this blog post I want to draw out some of the main points of Evron's 1983 essay, most of which remain directly relevant. This discussion is well suited to ThreeWayFight, because our blog is concerned not only with fascism and the struggle against it, but also with the ways anti-fascism gets misused to bolster oppression and repression (such as the U.S. government's mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II). The most glaring example of such twisted anti-fascism today is the exploitation of Nazi genocide to justify Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and murderous forced displacement of Palestinians. <br /><br /><i>(A PDF of</i> Radical America <i>vol. 17, no. 4, which contains Evron's article, "Holocaust: The Uses of Disaster," is <a href="http://libcom.org/library/radical-america-1704-political-uses-holocaust%20" target="_blank">available</a> through libcom.org. All page references in this blog post are to that article.)</i><br /><br />Evron's core argument is that Zionism treats the Nazi mass murder of European Jews -- a specific historical event that had specific historical causes -- in non-historical, mythological, even mystical terms, in order to manipulate both Jews and non-Jews into uncritically supporting the State of Israel and its policies. This mythological treatment is encapsulated in the term "Holocaust," which takes the event out of history by removing any specific reference to time or place, murderers or victims. (Arno Mayer has also pointed out in <i>Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?</i> that the standard meaning of "holocaust" is "a sacrificial offering wholly consumed by fire in exaltation of God." The idea that Auschwitz is somehow imbued with religious meaning is to my mind utterly obscene.) <br /><br />More specifically, Zionists have (a) treated Jews as almost the only victims of Nazi mass murder, (b) treated annihilation (or the desire to carry out annihilation) as the benchmark for non-Jews' treatment of Jews in all times and places, and (c) argued that the only way Jews can protect ourselves against the threat of annihilation is by having a state and military of our own. Evron rejects all of these claims. He argues that while the Nazi program of deliberate extermination targeted Jews first and foremost, it also killed many other people, including some three million non-Jewish Poles and millions of Russians, a fact that belies the Zionist belief that the Nazi genocide simply expressed timeless hatred of Jews. "The events can only be understood in the context of German and European history and ideology. We may find food for thought in the fact that genocide had been practiced by the Europeans in the non-European world for centuries (in the Americas, the Congo, etc.). The Nazi innovation was the introduction of these practices into the family of European nations" (9). <br /><br />As for using the Nazi genocide to "prove" the need for a Jewish state, <br /><blockquote>"Objective analysis and description would have demonstrated that if even the Poles and the Russians, well-rooted territorial nations both (the latter actually one of the world's mightiest military powers), are liable to extermination, then sovereignty and military prowess are no security against it. Objective reflection would have brought us to the further fact that the Israeli Jews were not saved by Zionism but by the unrelated fact that the Nazis failed to conquer Palestine…. It would therefore have transpired that this central Zionist tenet is meaningless, and that the ultimate guarantee against extermination (if such a guarantee is possible) lies in the eradication of ideologies which exclude any human group from the definition of humanity. This implies joint struggle and international cooperation that seek to overcome differences and barriers, not to heighten and strengthen them, as urged by powerful elements within Israel and in the Zionist movement" (10).</blockquote>Evron also counters Zionists' <br /><blockquote>"continuing effort to blur the decisive differences between Arab hatred and Nazism, such as the fact that the Nazis invented the myth of the ‘Jewish Conspiracy' for the purpose of inflaming an irrational, psychotic hatred of the Jews in the German people, whereas the Arabs are engaged in a struggle against a real enemy whose might really threatens them, who has already caused the flight of more than a million of their brethren from their homes, and who is now subjugating another two million. Moreover, Arab hostility is directed, rationally enough, against <i>the Israelis</i>, and not against all Jews wherever they are (although the support most Jews extend to Israel does tend to spread the hostility to all Jews) (19). <i>[More on this last point below. -- ML.]</i></blockquote>Mythologizing the Holocaust relieves the Israeli state of moral constraints: <br /><blockquote>People who believe themselves to be in danger of annihilation consider themselves free of any moral qualm which might tie their hands in their efforts to save themselves…. They are, therefore, uninhibited in advocating the most drastic steps against the non-Jewish population of the country" (20).</blockquote>The same mythology has helped the Israeli state to cultivate a sense of moral debt to Israel among Diaspora (especially American) Jews and non-Jews alike, for their failure to save Europe's Jews during World War II: <br /><blockquote>"Israel is presented to US Jews as being under a constant threat of annihilation by the surrounding Arab countries, in spite of the fact, which is not publicized, that it is several times stronger, and that in the foreseeable future it is in no military danger. This provides an opportunity for the Jews to assuage their guilt feelings by their economic and political mobilization ‘for the prevention of a second Holocaust.' Any war is therefore represented as a menace to the State's very existence, and the ensuing victory is then represented as a miracle, due, among other things, to Jewish support, thus providing the Jews with a sense of achievement and participation in the heroic events. Israel is also presented in this light to the non-Jewish world, in an attempt to silence criticism of its policies with an unanswerable argument: 'You, who stood idly on the sidelines during the Holocaust, may not tell us what we should do to prevent another Holocaust'" (15-16).</blockquote>There's a fundamental inconsistency in this mythology. On the one hand, Israel is constantly in danger of being wiped out, a magnet that attracts Gentiles' murderous hatred. On the other hand, Israel is the state that's supposed to keep us safe from antisemitism. In other words, "Israel is presented as a refuge in a storm, as insurance against the future--the same Israel which at the same time is pictured…as a candidate for annihilation. It would be useless to argue that this is a contradiction in terms, for we deal here with utterly irrational attitudes" (17). <br /><br />Evron points out that Holocaust mythology not only helps Israel rationalize its racist and murderous policies toward Palestinians -- in the long run, it also has consequences that will come back to haunt those who created it. For one thing, treating Jews as timeless victims in a class by themselves sets Jews apart from the rest of humanity. This is not exactly a good strategy for combating antisemitism. (However, extending Evron's point, the strategy makes sense if you believe that antisemitism is inevitable whenever Jews and non-Jews live together, which is one of political Zionism's founding premises.) <br /><br />In addition, for Israel to base its relationship with other countries (at least in the West) on Holocaust guilt and moral pressure is not going to work forever: <br /><blockquote>"The net result is that the State of Israel, established ostensibly to enable the Jews to lead a 'normal existence as a nation-state among other nation-states,' deliberately adopts a policy which puts it outside the system of power relationships normal among nations. It insists upon being treated as an abnormal nation, it avoids direct economic and political involvement in a world of power and interests, in the <i>historical</i> world, and tries to maintain a <i>non-historical</i> existence as a sect divorced from the historical process. <br /><br />"Needless to say, such a policy, successful as it has been in the short run, is doomed to fail in the long, having been initially based on a sense of past guilt…. The reserves of guilt feelings are being steadily depleted: fewer and fewer people remember the Holocaust, in spite of the reiterated harping on it…. It would be a hard day for Israel when it is called upon to perform in the real world, after the final exhaustion of its 'moral credit,' and when all of its structure and outlook have been formed under hothouse conditions" (14-15).</blockquote>None of this is to deny the continuing reality of antisemitism -- in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Supposed <a href="http://972mag.com/anti-semitism-has-no-place-in-palestine-advocacy/94201/%20" target="_blank">acts</a> of Palestine solidarity sometimes amount to anti-Jewish bigotry and violence; Hamas's 1988 <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp" target="_blank">charter</a> really does repeat bullshit Jewish conspiracy theories and treat the forged <i>Protocols of the Elders of Zion</i> as true. Up to a point, I agree with the argument by Evron and others that Palestinian and Arab antisemitism reflect Zionism's equation of Israel with the Jewish people as a whole. But as I've <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2006/10/right-wing-anti-imperialists-are-not.html" target="_blank">argued</a>, for example, in a 2006 debate about Hezbollah, this is not the whole story, because anti-Jewish bigotry was present in Arab and Muslim communities long before Israel or the Zionist movement were created. <br /><br />But Hamas's charter (even coupled with rocket attacks against civilian areas) doesn't justify bombing children. Israeli (and French) Jews are not under threat of annihilation from Palestinians or their supporters. We need to address antisemitism in concrete historical terms -- not mythologize it to defend the Israeli state's own institutionalized bigotry and mass violence.<br /><br /><b>Photo credit: </b>By ilya ginsburg from berlin, germany (remembering the holocaust, making another genocide), <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en" target="_blank">CC BY 2.0</a>, via Wikimedia Commons.<br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-55741333331984522152014-06-15T22:48:00.003-04:002014-09-08T21:26:07.931-04:00Reading "The Solstice" -- Kasama on right-wing mass movements<br />Rightist mass movements around the globe have made several dramatic advances recently. In India, the <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2008/06/hindu-nationalism-annotated.html" target="_blank">Hindu nationalist</a> Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a massive victory in the April-May 2014 national election. (The country's new prime minister is <a href="http://www.sacw.net/article8351.html" target="_blank">Narendra Modi</a>, who as chief minister of Gujarat state oversaw the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, in which well-organized Hindu nationalist mobs murdered some 2,000 Muslims, often with police collusion.)&nbsp;In the May 2014 European parliamentary elections, right-wing populist parties made <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/05/26/far-right-europe-election_n_5391873.html" target="_blank">big gains</a> in Britain, France, Denmark, and Austria.&nbsp;In Thailand, months of right-wing demonstrations against the elected liberal populist government succeeded in sparking a <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/up-to-speed-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-thai-coup.html" target="_blank">military coup</a>.&nbsp;In Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a group that has been repudiated by al-Qaeda as being too extreme, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/11/mosul-isis-gunmen-middle-east-states" target="_blank">conquered</a> much of the country's northwestern region, including Mosul, Iraq's second largest city.&nbsp;And let's not forget <a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2014/02/ukraines-upheaval-between-fascists.html" target="_blank">Ukraine</a>, where far rightists have been playing key roles on <i>both</i>&nbsp;sides of a bitter and growing <a href="http://libcom.org/news/eastern-ukraine-conflict-against-regime-kiev-junta-east-autonomous-workers-union-17052014" target="_blank">conflict</a>.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6ZjE9KRCmN4/U55Wd0oev_I/AAAAAAAAACc/EBDYw6JL6JY/s1600/Protesters_on_motorcycles_in_Bangkok,_1_December_2013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6ZjE9KRCmN4/U55Wd0oev_I/AAAAAAAAACc/EBDYw6JL6JY/s1600/Protesters_on_motorcycles_in_Bangkok,_1_December_2013.jpg" height="241" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="mw-mmv-title" style="background-color: #fbfbfb; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 1.2em; line-height: 24px; max-width: 60%; overflow: hidden; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013%E2%80%9314_Thai_political_crisis#mediaviewer/File:Protesters_on_motorcycles_in_Bangkok,_1_December_2013.jpg" target="_blank">Protesters on motorcycles in Bangkok</a>, 1 December 2013</span><a class="mw-mmv-license cc-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0" style="background-color: #fbfbfb; background-image: none; color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 0.9em; line-height: 24px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: right; vertical-align: middle; white-space: nowrap;" target="_blank">CC BY-SA 2.0</a></td></tr></tbody></table>All of this makes it an opportune moment to read "The Solstice: On the Rise of the Right-Wing Mass Movements." This essay by "NPC" was published in February on the Maoist website <a href="http://kasamaproject.org/">KasamaProject.org</a> in three installments [and now available in <a href="http://www.ultra-com.org/project/the-solstice/" target="_blank">one document</a> on the website <a href="http://www.ultra-com.org/" target="_blank">Ultra</a>]. I don't agree with all of "Solstice," but it offers a lot of useful information and an innovative analysis that can help leftists take a fresh look at the right. In this blog post I will outline some of the essay's main points and offer a few critical comments.<br /><br />In her/his overview discussion, NPC highlights the tendency of far right movements to combine rightist and leftist political themes:<br /><blockquote>"The new right-wing has become skilled at consuming and incorporating the most useful components of the last few decades' dead left-wing movements--many of these far-right groups actually clothe themselves in the aesthetics, theory and, to a limited extent, the practice, of autonomy, decolonization, and anarchism....<br /><br />"Bratstvo [in Ukraine] are Christian orthodox national anarchists, CasaPound [in Italy] founds squatted social centers and fights the police to defend them, Santi Asoke [in Thailand] runs autonomous rural communes, has a national network of co-operatives and talks of ‘decolonization' in much the same way as west-coast anarchists here in the US. All of these groups portray themselves as ‘neither' left nor right, or ‘beyond' left and right. Meanwhile, their post-left, post-Marxist aesthetic and post-colonial intellectual treatises act as a veil covering a fundamentally far-right ideology and deeply conservative political practice. Similarly, all invoke a mythic ‘community' to be found in tradition and regained through moral discipline, accompanied by the absolute destruction of all who oppose this ‘mystical unity,' whatever form it might take" (Part 3).</blockquote>I agree that this dynamic is important, and that when you combine leftist and rightist politics, the result is right-wing. But this really isn't new -- fascists have been parasitizing leftist politics from the beginning, a point that would have strengthened NPC's argument. Also, it's too simple to see the incorporation of leftist political themes as a veil or an aesthetic maneuver. It also embodies genuine changes in the far right, such as the shift by many rightists from advocating highly centralized nation-states to advocating various decentralized forms of authoritarianism and ethnic exclusivism.<br /><br />The essay's central case study is Thailand, whose right-wing mass movement, NPC argues, is "in many ways far more advanced than those of Ukraine or Italy" (Part 3):<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Thailand is... one of the few places where national-anarchist and effectively third positionist far-right organizations have had significant time to build up a social base, obtaining limited backing from the monarchy, historical backing from the US military, and intellectual justification from the country's ‘radical' intelligentsia. Some of these organizations, such as the Buddhist Santi Asoke group, are authentically anti-capitalist, utilizing leftist language and tactics, promoting autonomous self-governance and the rejection of international financial institutions like the IMF, all within the framework of a socially conservative, ethnically nationalist and neo-feudal political-economic program. Many of these groups draw their leadership from both the far-right paramilitaries of the 1970s as well as leftist NGOs, which often include demobilized Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) cadre. They thus represent not only the combination of leftist political imagery with a rightist core, but also the limited fusion of Thailand's left-wing and right-wing histories, with the latter subsuming the former." (Part 1)</blockquote>NPC interweaves this analysis with a detailed historical explanation of the recent "increasingly violent anti-democracy protests...in Bangkok, led by the Peoples' Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), whose Thai name more accurately translates to the ‘People's Committee for Absolute Democracy with the King as Head of State'" (Part One). "Solstice" traces the complex shifting of political and class forces in Thailand over the past two decades that brought this movement into being. This includes the rise of the left-populist Thai Rak Thai party, spearheaded by telecommunications mogul Thaksin Shinawatra, who advocated "a revitalized Keynesian development model for the country, investing in schools, basic transportation and agricultural infrastructure, as well as instituting a universal public healthcare system" and loaning money to villages to encourage small business formation (Part 2). Thaksin was overthrown in a 2006 military coup, but his supporters regrouped as the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), known as the Red Shirts, which brought together liberal capitalists aiming to regain political power and popular forces struggling for social justice. Opposing them were the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD), or Yellow Shirts, who supported the 2006 coup and were the precursors of the recent right-wing protestors.<br /><br />I know little about Thailand, so I can't assess the specifics very well, but I found this section especially interesting and informative. For example, there's a whole discussion of how some 1970s Marxists turned to a kind of cultural nationalism that glorifies traditional Thai village culture, which they see as the site of resistance to western consumerism and global neoliberalism. It's an agrarian myth that is most popular among upscale city dwellers. The parallels with western fascist politics are striking. (For a different leftist discussion of Thailand, see Louis Proyect's "<a href="http://louisproyect.org/2014/01/31/whats-going-on-in-thailand/" target="_blank">What's Going on in Thailand?</a>" and the useful comments on it by Michael Karadjis and others. Proyect's article fills in many of the reasons why the anti-Thaksin movement has attracted real popular support, but doesn't substantively call NPC's analysis into question.)<br /><br />After presenting the Thai case study, NPC uses it to develop an analytic model of how such far-right movements relate to other political forces. The model is based on Alain Badiou's discussion of "three types of subjectivity: faithful, reactionary and obscure" relative to a political "event" that opens the prospect of revolutionary change. (All quotes from Part 3.) The terminology here is a bit cumbersome, but bear with me:<br /><ul><li>The <i>faithful subject</i>&nbsp;equals "organized bodies that seek to preserve, consolidate, develop and extend the communist potentials embedded within the mass movement itself." In plain terms, the radical left. In Thailand "in 2010 and its aftermath, the forces in and around Red Siam most visibly played the role of the faithful subject."</li><li>The <i>reactionary subject</i>&nbsp;"attempts to deny and foreclose the eventual opening, to suffocate its communist potential and to ‘return to normal,' which really means the forcible implementation of capitalist discipline... Normally the role of reaction is filled by the state, the police, the military, etc." (Part 3). Politically, this can include forces ranging from hardline conservative to social democrat. In Thailand, this role has been played by the right wing of the Red Shirt movement, under the leadership of Yingluck Shinawatra (wife of Thaksin Shinawatra), who was Thailand's prime minister from 2011 until the 2014 coup.</li><li>The <i>obscure subject</i>&nbsp;"occults" the event "through the generation of a mystical, ahistorical unity that dissolves the present into the mythic image of some lost, prelapsarian past." (Part 3) In other words, rightist forces that divert popular unrest into false solutions -- specifically, in Thailand, "the anti-democracy protestors, and the right-wing populism they are a part of, [including] fundamentalist sects such as Santi Asoke and Pitak Siam."</li></ul>This is in fact a kind of three-way-fight analysis. Like this blog, NPC treats far right forces as an autonomous player that may be "in violent opposition" to both the left and the established power structure:<br /><blockquote>"In the terms established above,... we have to recognize that the anti-democracy protestors <i>are not</i>&nbsp;simply ‘the party of order' [i.e. the reactionary subject] contra the ‘party of anarchy' [the faithful subject]. In fact, the ‘party of order,' represented here by Yingluck and the liberal-democratic capitalist factions she represents, sees the obscure subject as itself fundamentally ‘terrorist,' and very much a part of <i>what it perceives to be</i>&nbsp;‘the party of anarchy.' There is some truth to this, as the obscure subject does not, at least initially, have to take a state form -- it can be earnestly anti-state, especially when it affirms a religious order against a secular one. In traditional liberal fashion, the party of order mushes together the far-right and the far-left until they appear to be nothing but a vague, terrorist ‘totalitarianism' evacuated of all sense or reason" (Part 3).</blockquote>But NPC's conception of this autonomous far right is more rigid than ThreeWayFight's. For one thing, NPC is confident that if or when the far right comes to power, it will behave in a predictable way:<br /><blockquote>"[T]he obscure subject can be thought of as simply the ‘anti-party,' imagining itself ‘beyond left and right'.... When in power, the anti-party can generate nothing but warlordism or a dry technocracy gilded in religion, war and spectacle. Its mode of rule is, by necessity, military and religious, though even its state forms can be administered in a quasi-stateless fashion at the lowest levels through a combination of indoctrination, self-organization and mercenary force wielded by local gentry" (Part 3).</blockquote>I appreciate NPC's point that the far right doesn't necessarily rely on a traditional strong state to enforce order, but may instead rule through <a href="http://sketchythoughts.blogspot.com/2010/08/thinking-about-warlordism.html" target="_blank">warlordism</a>&nbsp;or "in a quasi-stateless fashion." This is consistent with the rise of decentralist politics on the far right, from the U.S. paramilitary right's leaderless resistance to the newer doctrines of national anarchism and autonomous nationalism. But I think we should be cautious about thinking we know how far rightists will behave in power. Leftists have made this mistake repeatedly and have suffered for it. In particular, we should not underestimate the far right's capacity to remake society in radical ways. Witness German Nazism, which brought settler-colonialism into the heart of Europe and created a horrific new system of industrial slave labor.<br /><br />A related point is that we need to go beyond old school left ideas about fascism, &nbsp;which are represented in the concluding section of "Solstice" by a quote from Marc Saxer:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">"Against the vertigo of change, fascism promises to restore unity and order. The ‘disease of plurality" must be healed by uniformity. ‘The Other' outside and inside must be ‘rooted out' to heal the societal body.<br /><br />"Contrasting the ‘decay' of the present against an imagined golden past, fascist movements aim to turn back the wheel of history. The fascist utopia is basically the anti-thesis to the modern, pluralist and capitalist society. Fascism seeks to overcome the divisions of a fragmented society and the noise of a pluralist culture by melting all differences into a homogeneous, ‘people's community'" (Part 3).</blockquote>Yes and no. Fascism has always been about creating a "new order" as much as restoring a mythical past -- it represents a different conception of modernity, not a rejection of modernity in total. That's part of its appeal. And today the most dynamic fascist currents, notably those influenced by the European New Right, don't attack pluralism but embrace it, and say that they are defending cultural diversity against the oppressive effects of a homogenizing global economy and "totalitarian humanism." This isn't just a smokescreen -- it's a substantive reworking of fascist ideology that we need to understand and confront.<br /><br />Thankfully, the concluding section of "Solstice" does in fact go beyond old ideas, warning that we need to be prepared for "the frightening possibility of a directly politicized, far-right populism of a different form than we might expect" -- for example, one with "a techie-leftist branding," support from the infotech section of the ruling class, and "targeted expansions of quasi-socialist welfare programs in particular ‘creative class' urban enclaves. This would entail some degree of fusion with US progressivism, particularly the leftovers of the anti-globalization era (the ‘99ers,' many of whom went on to become the right-wing of Occupy), now distributed across NGOs, universities, municipal governments and union bureaucracies" (Part 3).<br /><br />NPC concedes that this specific scenario is "highly speculative," but argues that in one version or another, "such seemingly ‘left-right' syntheses are not only possible, but probable." "And these syntheses will not necessarily arise from the ‘usual suspects.' Any reactionary movement with real purchase in the US will not be based, like the Tea Party, among the predominantly conservative white Baby Boomers, [but rather] much closer to home, very much sharing its social base with any potential communist movement"&nbsp;(Part 3).<br /><br />While I wouldn't discount the "real purchase" of movements based among conservative white Baby Boomers (given that white evangelical Protestants alone number in the tens of millions), I agree that we could easily face right-wing populist movements with a very different demographic.<br /><br />As far as I can tell, "Solstice" has elicited little discussion among leftists so far. This is disappointing. It's a serious effort to grapple with important political developments in a new way. More and more, right-wing movements are not going to fit leftist preconceptions. We ignore this at our peril.<br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-49820209369884771802014-05-08T12:00:00.000-04:002014-06-10T16:15:31.900-04:00Frazier Glenn Miller, Nazi violence, and the state<br />In the 1980s, Frazier Glenn Miller was one of the most prominent white supremacist leaders in the United States. Lately he's been in the news again -- sometimes identified as Miller, sometimes as Frazier Glenn Cross -- charged with shooting dead three people at two Jewish centers in the Kansas City metro area on April 13.<br /><br />Miller’s story -- even the fact that he goes by two different last names -- dramatizes the profound shift in government security forces' relationship with the the U.S. far right over the past few decades. This issue has received little or no attention since Miller's April 13th arrest.<br /><br />Miller is a Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret who was kicked out of the Army in 1979 for distributing racist propaganda. As a member of the National Socialist Party of America, Miller helped to organize a coalition of Klansmen and Nazis in North Carolina called the United Racist Front, which carried out the Greensboro massacre on November 3, 1979. That day, a caravan of URF men drove to an anti-Klan rally organized by the Communist Workers Party, unloaded their guns, and shot five people to death. URF members were twice acquitted for the massacre by all-white juries. Miller was present at the scene and later declared, "I am more proud of the 88 seconds I spent in Greensboro on November 3, 1979, than I am of the twenty years I spent in the U.S. Army" (Martin Durham, <i>White Rage</i>, p. 44). He was never indicted for his role in the killings.<br /><br />The Greensboro massacre was a pivotal event for the U.S. far right in two ways. On one hand, it was a high water mark of far right violence carried out <i>with the involvement or sponsorship of government security services</i>. An <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/12/us/agent-tells-of-79-threats-by-klan-and-nazis.html" target="_blank">agent</a> of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was part of the URF and in later court testimony about the massacre "characterized his role as an undercover agent as one that gave people with a known propensity for illegal activity the ‘opportunity to violate the law.'" (This was under a Democratic administration, by the way.) <br /><br />The URF also included a man who was an informant for both the FBI and the local police. As Joanne Wypijewski reported in a 2005 <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2005/11/whitewash" target="_blank">article</a> for <i>Mother Jones</i>, "At the time of the killings, the police special agent in charge of the Klan informant was at the back of the [URF] caravan, having trailed it to the site. He did not intervene, or radio for help, or trip a siren, or pursue the killers as nine of their vehicles got away. Arrests occurred only because two police officers broke ranks and apprehended a van." <br /><br />I've seen several news reports since Miller's recent arrest that note his involvement in the Greensboro killings, but none that mention the role of federal agencies. (For more on the federal security services' history of involvement with the paramilitary far right, see my 2012 post, "<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2012/11/liberal-counterinsurgency-versus.html" target="_blank">Liberal counterinsurgency versus the paramilitary right</a>." <br /><br />The Greensboro massacre was also pivotal because it broke the suspicion and animosity that for decades had kept Klansmen and Nazis at odds with each other. After this event, collaboration, cross-over, and interchange between the two branches of the far right became much more common. As a result, the movement's ideological center of gravity shifted from segregationism to fascism -- away from restoring the old racial order, to new dreams of creating a new whites-only homeland or overthrowing the U.S. government entirely.<br /><br />Glenn Miller was in the thick of this change. A few months after Greensboro, he formed the Carolina (later Confederate) Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which in 1985 changed its name to the White Patriot Party. The WPP advocated an independent Southern White Republic. Leonard Zeskind <a href="http://www.irehr.org/issue-areas/race-racism-and-white-nationalism/item/555-new-questions-emerge-after-arrest-in-kansas-city-shootings" target="_blank">reports</a> that its activists "typically wore camouflage uniforms, regularly engaged in paramilitary-style training, and some illegally acquired weapons from nearby military bases…. [B]y 1986 Miller's White Patriot Party had over 1,000 members in North Carolina alone. Some reports indicated that 150 members had once been Special Forces soldiers."<br /><br />The WPP formed a relationship with the underground paramilitary group called The Order, which declared war on the U.S. government, robbed banks and armored cars, assassinated a Jewish talk show host, and engaged in shootouts with the police. The Order gave $200,000 or more of the money it stole to Miller's organization. In 1986, Miller himself went underground and issued his own declaration of war against blacks, gays, Jews, judges, and "despicable informants" (Mab Segrest, "Deadly New Breed," <i>Southern Exposure</i>, Spring 1989, p. 60).<br /><br />But in 1987 Miller was caught and turned state's witness. He fingered two of his former WPP assistants for the murders of three men in a Shelby, North Carolina gay bookstore. The next year, he testified for the prosecution in the Ft. Smith, Arkansas trial of fourteen white supremacist leaders for seditious conspiracy -- all of whom were acquitted. In exchange for his testimony, Miller spent only three years in prison, instead of the twenty-plus years he was originally facing, and <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304572204579501512760758736?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_news&amp;mg=reno64-wsj" target="_blank">entered the witness protection program</a>. He <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/04/accused-kansas-shooter-was-protected-federal-witness-but-hateful-ways-continued/" target="_blank">got the name</a> Frazier Glenn Cross and a new Social Security number when he was released in 1990.<br /><br />Zeskind <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/04/accused-kansas-shooter-was-protected-federal-witness-but-hateful-ways-continued/" target="_blank">argues</a> that the plea bargain deal with Miller was a bad choice for the federal government. "I believe that Miller was essentially playing a game with the feds. And I don’t think he had any intention of becoming a good witness. The guy was a stone-to-the-bone Nazi… He never gave that up.&nbsp;I am on the record as saying the man should have died in prison."<br /><br />I certainly agree that Miller deserved worse than he got. But even if his court testimony was useless, that doesn't necessarily mean the federal government got nothing out of the deal. He may well have provided information that the feds used in other ways -- we simply don't know. <i>[To clarify this point further, the feds are primarily concerned with keeping the far right under control as a potential political threat, not necessarily with preventing or punishing acts of violence. -- ML 6/10/2014] </i>In any case, by turning him the feds hurt morale and fueled dissension among white supremacists. Thirty years ago, Miller was one of the most admired people in the movement. Now, his former comrades <a href="http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1035328-69/#post12034541" target="_blank">loathe and despise</a> him as an FBI informant: "human garbage," "a RAT," "a man who deserves the time honored penalty for treason."<br /><br />And at this point, we also have to remember the Greensboro massacre. Because it's absurd to ask whether the federal government prosecutes Nazi violence "effectively" unless we recognize that this same government has also aided and abetted Nazis in killing people.<br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13622622.post-56356314192349213772014-03-30T20:23:00.001-04:002014-03-30T20:23:44.521-04:00Spencer Sunshine on rightists in the Occupy movement<br />Spencer Sunshine has a good article in the Political Research Associates newsletter (Winter 2014 issue): <span style="font-size: small;">"<a href="http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/02/23/the-right-hand-of-occupy-wall-street-from-libertarians-to-nazis-the-fact-and-fiction-of-right-wing-involvement/" target="_blank">The Right Hand of Occupy Wall Street: From Libertarians to Nazis, the Fact and Fiction of Right-Wing Involvement</a>." As Sunshine argues,</span> a broad range of rightists got involved in the mostly left-leaning movement, raising serious questions about inclusiveness and decentralized organizing.<br /><br />Three Way Fight addressed this issue briefly in a November 2011 post, "<a href="http://threewayfight.blogspot.com/2011/11/rightists-woo-occupy-wall-street.html" target="_blank">Rightists woo the Occupy Wall Street movement</a>." But Sunshine's article is much more detailed and comprehensive. Here are a few excerpts:<br /><blockquote>"Certainly, Occupy was always a largely left-leaning event. But right-wing participation has been the norm rather than the exception within recent left-wing U.S. movements—including the antiglobalization, antiwar, environmental, and animal rights movements—and Occupy was no exception. Right-wing groups inserted their narrative about the Federal Reserve into the movement’s visible politics; used Occupy’s open-ended structure to disseminate conspiracy theories (antisemitic and otherwise) and White nationalism; promoted unfettered capitalism; and gained experience, skills, and political confidence as organizers in a mass movement that, on the whole, allowed their participation."</blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *<br /><blockquote>"While few right-wing actors see capitalism as a system to be abolished, many are harsh critics of finance capital, especially in its international form. This critique unites antisemites, who believe that Jews run Wall Street; libertarian “free marketers,” who see the Federal Reserve as their enemy; and advocates of “producerist” narratives, who want “productive national capital” (such as manufacturing and agriculture) to be cleaved from “international finance capital” (the global banking system and free-trade agreements)." </blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *<br /><br />"The point it is not so much that the Left was significantly damaged by the Right’s presence in Occupy—though its presence did open the movement up to attacks in the mainstream media, which wasted the time and effort of organizers while turning off potential supporters. The deeper problem is that right-wing groups benefited from the Left’s willingness to give them a stage to speak from and an audience to recruit from." </blockquote><blockquote>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; *<br /><br />"Are there any practical steps, then, that activists on the Left can take to minimize participation by the Right?<br /><br />"The administrators at the OccupyWallSt.org forum, the main online location of internal discussions, took one small step after they were deluged by conspiracy theorists and Far Right propagandists. In October 2011, they banned anyone who posted about [David] Icke, [Lyndon] LaRouche, [David] Duke, or [Alex] Jones.<br /><br />"A more proactive first step would be to endorse an anti-oppression platform at the very start, such as the one created at Occupy Boston. Unlike the relatively vague statement from Zuccotti, Boston’s statement explicitly named the types of oppression that it opposed, including White supremacy, patriarchy, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Arab sentiment, Islamophobia, and anti-Jewish sentiment."</blockquote><a href="http://www.politicalresearch.org/2014/02/23/the-right-hand-of-occupy-wall-street-from-libertarians-to-nazis-the-fact-and-fiction-of-right-wing-involvement/" target="_blank">To read more</a> <br /><br />Matthew N Lyonshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15664330735255207352noreply@blogger.com1